I don't think I've mentioned this to you yet, but the sections on vocabulary are among my favorite parts of benzene. I've been trying recently to improve my own vocabulary (bought a copy of Word Power Made Easy, which I first read in high school English class, and have gotten through most of it), and I'm writing down the words you learned as well and adding them to my own list of words to learn.

I believe that between that Latin root and the general English use as "decorated", there was a specific noun "festoon" that meant something like what we mean by "bunting" in the non-baseball sense: draped fabrics, typically in seasonal or patriotic colors. From the suffix -oon and the fact that Spanish has kept the "fest" root intact except the e-ie substitution (in certain verb forms and the noun "fiesta"), I'm thinking this word came to English from Dutch, and probably arose during one of those periods when Spain and Holland shared an empire or shared a king/queen dual monarchy. Of course I could be all wrong on this, but I do remember reading something specific (years ago) about festoons being hung with that meaning before some big event.

I learned several of those words decades ago reading Heinlein. It seems like flummox, caviling, caustically, referent, and yawp, and maybe even "hove to" are words I first read or first understood at age 10-15 in books like Time Enough for Love, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and so forth. Usually the context gave a pretty good idea of the meaning, unlike a lot of the Buckley words (back when I forced myself to read him to keep a broad spectrum of political inputs) which often flummoxed me unless I had an unabridged dictionary at hand.