to irritate or annoy by petty provocations.
“‘what is it about her vex you so?'”
vex
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Category Archives: Glossary
drabness
a dull, lifeless, or faded appearance or quality.
“things became what they were: drabness looked drab; heat was hot.”
refurbish
to brighten or freshen up.
“helped her endure the chastising ghost; refurbished the baby faces of Howard and Buglar […]”
jostle
to make one’s way by pushing and shoving.
“Her back to them, she jostled the kindlin and almost lost the fire.”
sly
in a manner intended to avoid notice.
“She chose Halle and for their first bedding she sewed herself a dress on the sly.”
sullen
glossary
glossary: noun:(from m-w.com) a collection of textual glosses or of specialized terms with their meanings.
BUT–what are glosses?
gloss: noun: (from m-w.com, 3rd meaning of the word, definition 1a) a brief explanation (as in the margin or between the lines of a text) of a difficult or obscure word or expression
That means that a glossary is a collection of explanations of difficult words.
Cloak
Cloak: transitive verb: to cove or hide / noun: something that envelops or conceals
From “The Shawl”: First, I told him that keeping his sister’s shawl was wrong, because we never keep the clothing of the dead. Now’s the time to burn it, I said. Send it off to cloak her spirit. And he agreed.
Now I came to understand that the boy requested his father to burn the shawl so that the shawl will reach to the spirit of his father’s dead sister and cover her.
Stash
Stash: transitive verb : to store in a usually secret place for future use
From “The Shawl”: I got my growth earlier that some boys, and, one night when I was thirteen and Doris and Raymond and I were sitting around wishing for something besides the oatmeal and commodity canned milk I’d stashed so he couldn’t sell them, I heard him coming down the road.
Now I understand that the boy kept the oatmeal and commodity canned milk in secret place so that his father won’t sell them and they could eat later.
Avid
Avid: adjective: desirous to the point of greed, urgently eager
From “The Shawl”: For he kept seeing his mother put the baby and grip his sister around the waist. He saw the brown shawl with its red lines flying open. He saw the shadows, the wolves, rush together, quick and avid, as the wagon with sled runners disappeared into the distance- forever, for neither he nor his father saw Aanakwad again.
Now I came to know that the boy used to see a nightmare where his mother and sister are being chased by quick and hungrily greedy wolves.
Scorched
Scorch: verb: to burn a surface of so as to change its color and texture, to dry or shrivel with or as if with intense heat
From “The Shawl”: His chest was scorched with pain, and yet he pushed himself on. He’d never run so fast, so hard and furiously, but he was determined, and he refused to believe that the increasing distance between him and the wagon was real.
Now I came to understand that the boy was running very fast, so his chest was burning with pain but still he was not ready to give up the race with the wagon.
Regalia
Regalia; plural noun; the decorations, insignia, or ceremonial clothes of any office or order, or
rich, fancy, or dressy clothing; finery.
From What You Pawn I Will Redeem by Sherman Alexie : “So we headed over that way, feeling like warrior drunks, and we walked past this pawnshop I’d never noticed before. And that was strange, because we Indians have built-in pawnshop radar. But the strangest thing of all was the old powwow-dance regalia I saw hanging in the window.”
The word regalia means a clothing or something of the type that is used for ceremonial events such as graduations or in this case, a traditional Indian dance. The narrator, Jackson Jackson, saw a regalia in the window of the pawnshop.
Capricious
Capricious; adjective; subject to, led by, or indicative of a sudden, odd notion or unpredictable change; erratic.
From The Shawl by Louise Erdrich: “He became, for us, a thing to be avoided, outsmarted, and exploited. We survived off him as if he were a capricious and dangerous line of work. I suppose we stopped thinking of him as a human being, certainly as a father.”
After searching this word, I see that the narrator was describing his father as something dangerous and unpredictable. He and the siblings he was referring to saw their father as someone crazy.
Monotonously
Monotonously; adjective; lacking in variety, tediously unvarying.
From The Shawl by Louise Erdrich: “If she could have thrown off that wronghearted love, she would have, but the thought of the other man, who lived across the lake, was with her always. She became a gray sky, stared monotonously at the walls, sometimes wept into her hands for hours at a time.”
After searching this word, I now understand that the narrator described the women as boring, having no variety or activity. She had become flat.
quizzical
quizzical odd, queer, or comical. questioning or puzzled: a quizzical expression on her face.
He looked at me steady and quizical, as though he had never had a drink in his life, and i wiped his face again witht hat frayed piece of blanket.
