I'm feeling lazy this week, so we'll do a theme that's easy for me: short words.

skep – an old-style beehive: dome-shaped, and made of straw or wicker

And in Granny Weatherwax’s garden the bees rose out of their hives. The emerged like steam, colliding with one another in their rush to get airborne. The deep gunship hum of the drones underpinned the frantic roars of the workers. … The swarms spiraled up over the clearing, circled once, and the broke and headed away. Others joined them, out of backyard skeps and hollow trees, blackening the sky.
– Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

knurl – a small protruding knob or ridge (also as verb)
knurl or knurling is also the name for something we see every day without knowing the word.
knurling – a surface of such bumps, to improve grip

It seemed that those trees would suit admirably … to serve as new masts and spars, once they were trimmed of limbs and stripped down. The limbs were not so low on them that the of the trees would have too many knots or knurls once they were cut to the right lengths. "Ya chose well, sor,” the carpenter allowed to Chiswick.
– Dewey Lambdin, The French Admiral

All of the bits … have chrome bit holders with a diamond knurl for fingertip control.
– Professional Tool & Equipment News, Feb. 1, 2006

cadge – to beg or sponge off of <cadge a free cup of coffee>

The quote is from memory, as I can’t locate it on-line. Christopher Isherwood, I believe.

The only fault I find with badgers
Is that they’re such appalling cadgers.
If you have one in to dine,
He’ll ask a bottle of your wine
To take home. If he likes your prints,
He’ll drop the most unsubtle hints:
“I say, who is this picture by?
It’s my birthday next July.”
Once one asked me for my car.
This was going rather far,
So I asked him, “Wouldn’t you rather
Have this ring? It belonged to my father.
It’s set with diamonds.” Calm and bland,
He thanked me, and held out his hand!
I had an apoplectic fit,
But the badger ran away with it.

Thank you, timnan, and thanks to Richard P. for the same by email.

plage – the beach of a seaside resort
[ultimately from Greek plagios ‘oblique; slanting’; thence to Late Latin to Italian to French (‘beach; shore’) to English]

Now she took her hand away. She examined his face with a certain seriousness. She said: ‘All men are pigs, but some are lesser pigs than others. All right. I will meet you. But not for dinner. What I may tell you is not for public places. [N]ot at the fashionable plage.’
. . .Bond said: ‘Three o’clock then. I shall be there. Goodnight.’
– Ian Fleming, For Your Eyes Only (ellipses omitted)

['plage' also has a meaning used mostly in astronomy, but that is a separate word, with the same spelling but different origin. OED says, “In French the two words plage region and plage beach … have been confused since the 16th cent.”]

Yesterday’s word plage brought us the beach. Let’s enjoy another day in the water.

lido – a public open-air swimming pool or bathing beach
[from the Lido, a famous beach resort near Venice. The name, Italian for ‘shore’, is related to the word littoral.]

With 2008 racing from winter to summer … , mid-May finds us enjoying glorious weather and turning our thoughts to happy days at the local lido. … London's lidos … offer a new generation all the fun of the seaside in the inner city. … here's the skinny on the best in outdoor swimming London has to offer this summer.
– The Londonist, May 9, 2008

ween – (archaic:) to think; suppose; believe

Bonus word: prate – to talk idly and at length (typically about trivial matters); to chatter

The poem providing our quote is both witty and deep. Do take a moment, at the link, to enjoy it in full.

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind. …

[The six “observe” by touch. They come away with six very different views, for each has "seen" only apart of the whole.] …

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

– John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887), The Blind Men and the Elephant

Don't forget about our recent Bluffing Game word, "lirp," meaning snapping the fingers.

Wordmatic just won the limerick game, her lines 3 and 4 were

"They were harping and carping
and lirping and larping--"

Now "LARP" is a bit of a stretch, as it's an acronym for "live action role-playing," but it fit well enough. However, "lirp" is quite legitimate.

You may have heard of Ernest Rutherford (1871 –1937), who won a Nobel Prize and is considered the father of nuclear physics. He grew up in the wild frontier of colonial New Zealand, where his parents raised “a little flax and a lot of children”.

… he helped at his father’s flax mill in Brightwater where wild flax cut from aboriginal swamps was retted, scutched and hackled for linen thread and tow. He lost two younger brothers to drowning; the family searched the Pacific shore near the farm for months.
– Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb

ret – to soak (flax, for example) so as to separate the fibers [cognate with to rot]
scutch – to separate the valuable fibers from the woody parts (of flax, for example), by beating