Vocabulary

I've just finished reading quite a good book entitled "1491". It is a survey of contemporary understanding of the peoples of the western hemisphere at and before the arrival of Columbus. The two main ideas are that there were a lot of people here at the time, most of whom perished due to the introduction of diseases for which they had little immunity and that in many ways native American culture equaled or exceeded that of the old world. Though I enjoyed the read, the content of the book did not inspire this post. The vocabulary did. This book is peppered with words that I did not know. I was so struck by the number of such words that around page 100 I began writing them down. Between there and the end of the book there were 21 words that I had never heard of. Crazy words, wild words, highfalutin words. Here they are with definitions where I could find them in my nine pound dictionary.

Pederasty: sexual relations between two males, especially when one is a minor
Coruscating: emitting flashes of light, sparkle, scintillate
Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part
Perduring:
Gawped: staring with the mouth open in wonderment
Bedizened: dressed or adorned in a showy, gaudy, or tasteless manner
Lacunae: gaps or missing parts as in a manuscript, series or logical argument
Plashing: gently splashing:
Longueur: a long and boring passage in a literary work
Plonk: inferior or cheap wine
Numinous: spiritual or supernatural
Ziggurat: a temple of Sumerian origin in the form of a pyramidal tower
Palanquin: a passenger conveyance, consisting of a covered or boxlike litter carried by means of poles resting on the shoulders of several men
Rebec: a renaissance fiddle
Imisserate:
Fissiparous: reproducing by fission
Expatiated: enlarged in discourse or writing, made copious in description or discussion
Toft: the site of a house and out building
Bedizened: same as above. The author used the word twice, once near the beginning and once near the end.

I am quite bewildered by this situation. Am I lacking in vocabulary? Are these ordinary words that most people know? Or is the author so erudite that he doesn't realize he is using words most people don't know? Seven of these words were not recognized by the spell check program I ran them through. Consider the word gawped. It seems gaped would have sufficed and been more widely known. Should I be offended by the author's showing off or actually impressed? He apparently did know the word. Surely he didn't, at that particular point in his manuscript, decide to go to his thesaurus to look for an obscure synonym for gaped. But if not from his thesaurus, then where did he get this word? If he read it or heard it, then that means that there is someone else who once chose to say gawp instead of gape. What is our author reading? The mind boggles. And what about the editor of this book? Wouldn't this linguistic chest pounding have elicited some cautionary remark and if so, doesn't it mean that the writer self-consciously persevered? Would dinner with this guy be a great time or a pain in the ass?