The editors of American Heritage dictionaries have compiled a list of the 100 words they think that every high school student should know at graduation. I admit I had to look up a number of these for clarification … and because I’d never heard of a few :p
In honour of my 100 things to do, I used them all (hopefully, correctly) in the story that follows. Can’t say it’s a Pulitzer Prize-winner but it serves its purpose 
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One Thursday morning in September, only hours before the onset of the autumnal equinox, Jim Beane decided to forego his quotidian breakfast of poached eggs, toast and tomato salsa for a jejune diet: 2 cups of black decaf, with 4 tablespoons in each. In fact, as far as breakfasts went, it was rather abstemious. Along the Champs d’Elysées, in a Paris bistro surrounding by a homogenous curtain of deciduous trees and flanked by a wrought-iron fence, Jim might have paid a whopping 18 Euros for the same as a gauche university undergrad. But his days of travelling incognito had long since ended, as fleeting and evanescent as his dream of studying French literature once was, belying a passion that he never really lost.
Jim read the newspaper front to back, skimming an article on the nanotechnology behind a plasma toothbrush no larger than a ladybug’s eye. Jim considered the invention fatuous; what possible purpose could it serve? Although he respected their acumen, Jim thought the hubris of some of his colleagues in the scientific community who believed themselves omnipotent was incontrovertible, and their superciliousness never failed to surprise him. A group of yeoman from totalitarian, xenophobic regimes was enfranchised in a ceremony on Parliament Hill before the immigration law was abrogated. Last night, a quasar had lit next to the moon near a vacuous vortex, revealing a star-like impression of the Virgin Mary, the original suffragist. Jim deemed this astronomical event an auspicious one. The city’s feckless mayor, a master of circumlocution if there ever was one, who managed to retain the highest antebellum popular vote in 200 years despite a regular practice of filibustering and chicanery, had been called to account for his laissez faire attitude, having been inculcated in a pecuniary infrastructure scandal involving several city councillors accused of gerrymandering local officials, notarizing false documents and kowtowing to a special interest group. Rumours abounded of his imminent impeachment, power usurpation and refusal to make reparations. Ironically, the mayor had been the one to blow the whistle on the fiduciary affair and he vehemently denied his involvement, becoming bellicose at the mere hint of any suggested wrongdoing when probing reporters interpolated a private conversation between the mayor and his executive aide, subjugating them both to intense media scrutiny.
Jim circumnavigated the kitchen table and placed the paper on the counter, folding it into a ziggurat so that its hypotenuse lay at a right-angle to the stove. His wife, Afia, a taxonomist by trade who was studying plant nomenclature when they met, would surely appreciate his reciprocal thoughtfulness. Except ever since she had lost the baby, his usually sanguine and loquacious wife had been too lugubrious and diffident to notice his obsequious attentions. The precipitous change had been tectonic: almost immediately, she had become tempestuous and churlish since her facetious soliquoy in front of the congregation, denouncing the hegemony and oligarchy of the church, followed by her subsequent expulsion and status as a non-sectarian. But whatever the reason for her newfound, nihilistic “bad girl” persona, she was still one hell of a cook, Jim thought, helping himself to a parabola-shaped mound of her unctuous butter cream pudding. This was an extravagance that Jim refused to abjure!
Jim left the house and climbed into his car, briefly considering the thermodynamics that propelled it forward. Between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., Jim worked as a geneticist for a pharmaceutical company manufacturing polymers. He was in charge of the mitosis lab, duplicating chromosomes and then selectively winnowing them down to only the best gametes. His work depended on carefully setting the parameters of respiration and haemoglobin before oxidizing the moieties and subjecting them to photosynthesis. He then documented their metamorphosis and kinetic energy levels as they changed shape. His research, if properly recapitulated, could provide the paradigm for scientists studying stem cell reproduction around the world.
Between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., Jim moonlit as a copyeditor for a Christian publishing house, bowlerizing some of America’s most popular fiction of its redundant tautology and incorrect orthography. He expurgated all references to wanton violence, sex and sexual acts, alcohol, and the worst criminals of gratuity, Canadian Liberals. He consulted his lexicon of deleterious words and fed the texts through a scanner that searched literary databases for latent plagiarism, hoping to spare the company a disaster similar to the New York Times’ Jayson Blair debacle.
By the end of the day, an enervated Jim had an epiphany—he really needed to work less!
