Talking Big

I should know these, I know. I know.

 virago  (noun) a loud-voiced, ill-tempered, scolding woman.

 From Nabokov’s Mary. Chapter Two.

In a haphazard way she cleaned the rooms herself, but she had never been able to cope with food, so she kept a cook—the terror of the local market, a vast red-haired virago who on Fridays donned a crimson hat and sailed off for the northern quarters where she traded her blowsy charms.

 mandrill (noun) a large baboon, Mandrillus (or Papio) sphinx, of western Africa, the male of which has a face brightly marked with blue and scarlet and a muzzle that is ribbed: an endangered species.

 From Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor. Chapter Three.

…the expression of a grinning mandrill.

 stercoricolous (adjective) living in dung

 From The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes. Page 59.

…a convention of stercoricolous squaws.

 blister beetles (noun) any of various beetles of the family Meloidae, many of which produce a secretion capable of blistering the skin.

 From The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes. Page 84.

Blister beetles sat on the brass terrets or suddenly still, fell dryly to the ground.

 dum-dum bullet (noun) Expanding bullets, also known colloquially as dumdum bullets, are projectiles designed to expand on impact. This causes the bullet to increase in diameter, to combat over-penetration and produce a larger wound, thus dealing more damage to a living target.

 From The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes. Page 111.

But the eye of the woman who felled eagles with a rifle and downed them to bounce in the dust with heads smashed by a single dum-dum bullet…