We haven’t gotten up to much lexpionage around here lately, have we? As usual, there’s no particular reason for it. I’m just very lazy and easily distracted. So back at Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon? Yes.
Where we learn words like fleam:
It had been forged to order by the same maker of instruments who supplied the rabbi-physicians of Zelikman’s family with their scalpels and bloodletting fleams, in sly defiance of Frankish law, which forbade Jews to bear arms even in self-defense, even when an armed gang of ruffians dragged your mother and sister screaming from the kitchen and did rank violence to them in the street while you, a boy, were obliged to stand bladeless by.
A fleam is exactly what context says it is– a lancet for opening veins. Although this gives you the idea that you could shiv someone with one if they were raping your sister, and you probably could, it looks more like a little hammer than anything we’d think of as a slicing device. The word itself goes back to the Greek root phlebo- meaning “vein.”
Or contumelious, which is an awful lot like contumacious, but different enough to catch the eye:
He was nearly as gifted at languages as the contumelious myna.
Contumely is absue, scorn, or disdain. To be contumelious is to act in a way that shames and humiliates with insults. Quite a bit more powerful there than contumacious and good to know. And from the Latin contumax, meaning insolent.
And also, affiant:
All that remained of the temple, reared by Alexander during his failed conquest of Caucasia and affiant now to that failure and to the ruin of his gods, was a wind-worn pedestal and the candle stub of a fluted column, against which a would-be ruffian named Hanukkah sat propped with his right hand over the wound in his sizable belly, as he had sat for two long days and nights, waiting with mounting impatience for the angel of death.
This is a tricky one. Affiant essentially means witness. Or I guess it’s tricky, to me, because of Chabon’s way of packing about 18 different ideas into one sentence. An affiant is a person who makes an affadavit. It’s from Middle French afier, meaning “to confide,” “to trust,” or “to promise,” which is the same root that gives us “fiance.” Prior to that it’s straight Latin ad fidere, “to trust.”
And that’s where we’ll stop, because staring at fidere brings to mind “fid” which makes me think of Anathem, which is what I was sure I’d be writing for the Yuletide rare fandoms ficathon this year, but it turns out not. And I spent all weekend watching a certain set of DVDs for the fandom I am writing for and I’m finding it really hard to get going with a story in that fandom which also involves a love of Latin as in In Hoc Signo Vinces except I’m not writing about that part of it and the part I should be writing about really makes me wish I knew Russian. Anybody know Russian? I’ll be your best friend! Okay!
I stop the little trembling that started when I saw her coming. I’m so shame of myself, I say. And the Lord he done whip me little bit too.
The subtle knife was responsible for the small-scale, low-level leakage. It was damaging, and the universe was suffering because of it, and she must talk to Will and Lyra and find a way to stop it. 
By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane. Sitting there, on the sofa, I managed to attune, by a series of stealthy movements, my masked lust to her guileless limbs. It was no easy matter to divert the little maiden’s attention while I performed the obscure adjustments necessary for the success of the trick. Talking fast, lagging behind my own breath, catching up with it, mimicking a sudden toothache to explain the breaks in my patter– and all the while keeping a maniac’s inner eye on my distant golden goal, I cautiously increased the magic friction that was doing away, in an illusional, if not factual, sense, with the physically irremovable, but psychologically very friable texture of the material divide (pajamas and robe) between the weight of two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion. Having, in the course of my patter, hit upon something nicely mechanical, I recited, garbling them slightly, the words of a foolish song that was then popular–O my Carmen, my little Carmen, something, something, those something nights, and the stars, and the cars, and the bars, adn the barmen; I kept repeating this automatic stuff and holding her under its special spell (spell because of the garbling), and all the while I was mortally afraid that some act of God might interrupt me, might remove the golden load in the sensation of which all my being seemed concentrated, and this anxiety forced me to work, for the first minute or so, more hastily than was consensual with deliberately modulated enjoyment. The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and the bars, and the barmen, were presently taken over by her; her voice stole and corrected the tun I had been mutilating. She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of the old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa– and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty– between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.
When Mr. and Mrs. Dursley woke up on the dull, gray Tuesday our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country. Mr. Dursley hummed as he picked out his most boring tie for work, and Mrs. Dursley gossiped away happily as she wrestled a screaming Dudley into his high chair.
In the fall I myself started back home from Mexico City and one night just over Laredo border in Dilley, Texas, I was standing on the hot road underneath an arc-lamp with the summer moths smashing into it when I heard the sound of footsteps from the darkness beyond, and lo, a tall old man with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he passed, he said, “Go moan for man,” and clomped on back to his dark. Did this mean that I should at last go on my pilgrimage on foot on the dark roads around America? I struggled and hurried to New York, and one night I was standing in a dark street in Manhattan and called up to the window of a loft where I thought my friends were having a party. But a pretty girl stuck her head out the window and said, “Yes? Who is it?”