That would make sense, I saw the sentence 'self-appointed keeper of the village's conscience'.

bur·lesque [ bur lésk ] noun (plural bur·lesques) Definition: 1. mockery by ludicrous imitation: the mocking of a serious matter or style by imitating it in an incongruous way 2. work using burlesque: a literary or dramatic work that uses burlesque 3. ludicrous imitation: an incongruous imitation o...

What is the difference between the 'voice of x's conscience' and the 'keeper of x's conscience'?

That may depend on what you read and where you live. I think first of less sinister usages for lustration:

Perhaps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustration

hmmm, I just call 'em scabs.

Surely it is what burgeons over the scab?

Cathartic is more closely related to purgative. Lustration, unlike the aforesaid words does not usually appertain to emotional purging but rather to purging in the more Stalinist sense of the word, such as the lustration in the former Yugoslavia of war criminals. Epuration (a word with more currency...

Intemerate

a. 1. Pure; undefiled.

A most excellent word.

With the third meaning, would a variable that appears to be correlated to another but is only so because of a third determinant be orthogonal or is it only those statistics that are altogether inapposite?

I once used this selfsame word in a forum, which only occasioned the query: 'what's wrong with "worthless"'.

Has anyone encountered this idiom? How exactly do you avail yourself of it?

Excellent word... it has a nice dialectal quality to it.

A Google search would seem to suggest that this word is rather more commonplace in French.

Viperine is the same.

a. 1. Like a miss; prim; affected; sentimental.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Missish