Author: Christopher Cruz

Disdain. A noun defined as “a feeling of contempt for someone or something regarded as unworthy or inferior” by Merriam-Webster dictionary. In the short story The Ride by JL Williams. It talks about the situations that come up on a daily basis on MTA public transportation. He goes from describing a young woman wearing clothes way too small for her body to a crackhead high off of drugs. But in this certain excerpt he dealt with a black woman with a baby carriage trying to get on the train. But she was being extremely disrespectful to one of the passengers. The author included the lines “… irritants that they feel the need to convey their disdain for a while we share a confined space for a limited time. JL Williams is basically saying how some people on the train are on a mission to make you despise them, acting outrageous is second nature to them.

“Brave We Are” by Tahira Naqvi uses a wide range of vocabulary. For instance, the word hybrid stuck out to me because it was very repetitive throughout the story. Kasim kept asking his mother for the definition of it and kept getting frustrated because his mother would try to avoid the question or work her way around it. She finally replied ” it’s sort of a mixture, a combination of different sorts of things”. She clearly had the right idea but wasn’t quite sure what it meant. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary the word hybrid is a noun defined as “an offspring of two animals or plants of different races. With this definition we can see that she wasn’t completely wrong she just did not specific definition.

While reading the story “The Turbid Ebb and Flow of Misery” by Margaret Sanger I stumbled upon the word fetid. I stared at the word for a while and did not know what it meant. The excerpt read ” There were the approximately ten thousand apartments in New York into which no sun ray penetrated directly; such windows as they had opened only narrow court from which rose fetid odor.” According to Merriam- Webster dictionary the word fetid is an adjective which means “having a heavy offensive smell”. In the story the she used that word to describe the harsh living situations in early 1900s New York. Conditions such as large families being forced to live together in small one bed room apartments, which was a direct cause of a horrible smell that was so strong it will leave the apartments through the small opening in the windows.

Christopher Cruz
Glossary #1
English 1101
Professor Garcia

“in·ev·i·ta·ble”
In my English 1101 course we read an excerpt from the autobiography of Malcolm X titled “Coming To An Awareness of Language.” While reading along I came upon the word inevitable amongst a couple of others. The word inevitable is an adjective defined as incapable of being avoided or evaded in the dictionary Merriam- Webster. While finishing up this excerpt I noticed an unfamiliar word. In the beginning of section 17 this word was used in a sentence, ” I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying.” Malcolm X was basically saying how for the first time he could finally understand the text he was reading. He felt proud because coming from the streets people were uneducated and were not proficient at reading or writing.