He has spent the past three months in Florida, ostensibly for medical treatment, but in actual fact to avoid prosecution. The e-mail requested account information, ostensibly to help clear up a "billing error"
in a way that appears or claims to be one thing when it is really something else
scarcely
I was scarcely able to move my arm after the accident. I could scarcely believe it when she said she wanted to marry me. /Scarcely had I sat down to eat when the phone rang./ He's only two - you can scarcely blame him for behaving badly
almost not; used to say that something happened immediately after something else happened; certainly not
venerable
a venerable tradition/company/family She has worked at such venerable institutions as Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York.
to want something very much or hope to achieve something or be successful
nexus
Times Square is the nexus of the New York subway. Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to argue that the "contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest