Franny and Zooey: List 3

by J.D. Salinger
Combining a short story and a novella, Franny and Zooey focuses on two siblings from the fictional Glass family, which Salinger wrote about in numerous short stories.

This list covers "Zooey," pages 101–170 of the 2014 Little, Brown edition.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: List 1, List 2, List 3

Here are links to our lists for other works by J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye; Nine Stories; Hapworth 16, 1924
40 words 28 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. redoubtable
    worthy of respect or honor
    ...a sprawling miscellany of vaguely citational-looking documents and trophylike objects of various shapes and sizes, all attesting, one way or another, to the redoubtable fact that from 1927 through most of 1943 the network radio program called “It’s a Wise Child” had very rarely gone on the air without one (and, more often, two) of the seven Glass children among its panelists.
  2. inveterate
    habitual
    The decoration scheme for the walls was, in fact, the brain child—with Mrs. Glass’s unreserved spiritual sanction and everlastingly withheld formal consent—of Mr. Les Glass, the children’s father, a former international vaudevillian and, no doubt, an inveterate and wistful admirer of the wall décor at Sardi’s theatrical restaurant.
  3. stolid
    having or revealing little emotion or sensibility
    A four-story private school for girls stood directly across the side street—a stolid and rather aloofly anonymous-looking building that rarely came alive till about three-thirty in the afternoon, when public-school children from Third and Second Avenues came to play jacks or stoopball on its stone steps.
  4. intrinsically
    with respect to its inherent nature
    Not only were the furnishings old, intrinsically unlovely, and clotted with memory and sentiment but the room itself in past years had served as the arena for countless hockey and football (tackle as well as “touch”) games, and there was scarcely a leg on any piece of furniture that wasn’t badly nicked or marred.
  5. becoming
    displaying or setting off to best advantage
    Despite the extraordinary fineness of his features, and his age, and his general stature—clothed, he could easily have passed for a young, underweight danseur—the cigar was not markedly unbecoming to him.
  6. fritter
    spend frivolously and unwisely
    “Frances. Let’s go, buddy. Let’s not fritter away the best part of the day here…. Let’s go, buddy.”
  7. fractious
    easily irritated or annoyed
    “Why’d you wake me up?” she asked. She was still too heavy with sleep to sound really fractious, but it was apparent that she felt there was some kind of injustice in the air.
  8. unprepossessing
    creating an unfavorable or neutral first impression
    The instant his unprepossessing head emerged into daylight, sunlight, Franny took him under the shoulders and lifted him up into intimate greeting distance.
  9. ostensibly
    from appearances alone
    He put his cigar in his mouth, and, with his right hand, up in the treble keys, he began to play, in octaves, the melody of a song called “The Kinkajou,” which, somewhat notably, had shifted into and ostensibly out of popularity before he was born.
  10. succor
    help in a difficult situation
    She was still stroking Bloomberg, still succoring him, forcibly, into the subtle and difficult world outside warm afghans.
  11. supine
    lying face upward
    Then, on a sudden but apparently pressing impulse, he stretched out supine on the carpet.
  12. sublimation
    making the expression of an impulse socially acceptable
    “In the one LeSage sent over,” he said, crossing his feet, “I’m supposed to be Rick Chalmers in, I swear to God, a 1928 drawing-room comedy straight out of French’s catalogue. The only difference is that it’s brought gloriously up to date with a lot of jargon about complexes and repressions and sublimations that the writer brought home from his analyst’s.”
  13. posterity
    all future generations
    And just when the sensitive subway guard’s problems are getting the best of him, destroying his faith in Mankind and the Little People, his nine-year-old niece comes home from school and gives him some nice, pat chauvinistic philosophy handed down to us through posterity and P.S. 564 all the way from Andrew Jackson’s backwoods wife.
  14. expound
    state
    We don’t talk, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound.
  15. abate
    become less in amount or intensity
    He stared at the glass ball till the snowstorm had abated somewhat.
  16. hackneyed
    repeated too often; overfamiliar through overuse
    It was fresh enough, at least, and it was his own, it wasn’t part of a hackneyed trend in scripts.
  17. inane
    devoid of intelligence
    What happened was, I got the idea in my head—and I could not get it out—that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything.
  18. perfunctory
    as a formality only
    I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a while—there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time!
  19. acquisitive
    eager to attain and possess material possessions
    “As a matter of simple logic, there’s no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who’s greedy for material treasure—or even intellectual treasure—and the man who’s greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure’s treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.”
  20. argot
    a characteristic language of a particular group
    She said a number of words of praise to him, in the private argot of the game, then put him down and picked up his leash, and the two walked gaily west, toward Fifth Avenue and the Park and out of Zooey’s sight.
  21. guileless
    innocent and free of deceit
    Behind him, just then, Franny blew her nose with guileless abandon; the report was considerably louder than might have been expected from so fine and delicate-appearing an organ.
  22. censorious
    harshly critical or expressing censure
    Zooey turned around to look at her, somewhat censoriously.
  23. eschew
    avoid and stay away from deliberately
    Zooey turned and looked at her, and—unpredictable young man—made a very dour face, as though he had suddenly eschewed any and all forms of levity.
  24. levity
    a manner lacking seriousness
    Zooey turned and looked at her, and—unpredictable young man—made a very dour face, as though he had suddenly eschewed any and all forms of levity.
  25. mettlesome
    having a proud, courageous, and unbroken spirit
    “Tactless! Never. Outspoken, yes. High-spirited, yes. Mettlesome. Sanguine, perhaps, to a fault. But no one has ever—”
  26. sanguine
    confidently optimistic and cheerful
    “Tactless! Never. Outspoken, yes. High-spirited, yes. Mettlesome. Sanguine, perhaps, to a fault. But no one has ever—”
  27. protracted
    relatively long in duration
    A silence followed for a minute or so. It was broken only by the sound of Franny blowing her nose—an abandoned, protracted, “congested” blow, suggestive of a patient with a four-day-old head cold.
  28. apostasy
    rejection of religious beliefs, political party, or cause
    I don’t know if you remember, but I remember a time around here, buddy, when you were going through a little apostasy from the New Testament that could be heard for miles around.
  29. pundit
    an expert who publicly gives opinions via mass media
    Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls—but, my God, who besides Jesus really knew which end was up?
  30. pithy
    concise and full of meaning
    Solomon would have had a few pithy words for the occasion. I’m not sure Socrates wouldn’t have, for that matter. Crito, or somebody, would have managed to pull him aside just long enough to get a couple of well-chosen words for the record.
  31. cant
    insincere talk about religion or morals
    If you don’t understand Jesus, you can’t understand his prayer—you don’t get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant.
  32. prostrate
    lying face downward
    He stared over at Franny’s prostrate, face-down position on the couch, and heard, probably for the first time, the only partly stifled sounds of anguish coming from her.
  33. contrition
    sorrow for sin arising from fear of damnation
    The color of his pallor, however, was a curiously basic white—unmixed, that is, with the greens and yellows of guilt or abject contrition.
  34. fastidious
    giving careful attention to detail
    The lettering was minute, but jet-black and passionately legible, if just a trifle fancy in spots, and without blots or erasures. The workmanship was no less fastidious even at the bottom of the board, near the doorsill, where the two penmen, each in his turn, had obviously lain on their stomachs.
  35. extant
    still in existence; not extinct or destroyed or lost
    And, in fact, unless one chose to make a fairly thoughtful survey of the reading matter extant, there were few, if any, certain indications that the former occupants had both reached voting age within the predominantly juvenile dimensions of the room.
  36. alimentary
    of or providing nourishment
    But she had, so to speak, been cruising in a patrol boat down and up her children’s alimentary canals for so many years that the sigh was in no sense a real signal of defeat, and she said, almost immediately, “I don’t see how you expect to get your strength and all back if you don’t take something nourishing into your system..."
  37. irreproachable
    free of guilt; not subject to blame
    A year or so earlier, in an unwarrantably self-deprecating paragraph of a letter to her brother Buddy, she had referred to her own figure as "irreproachably Americanese.”
  38. timbre
    the distinctive property of a complex sound
    At this hour, it was very possible that Franny felt deeply hesitant about taking a chance on just the timbre, let alone the verbal content, of any of her brothers’ voices on the phone.
  39. ballast
    any heavy material used to stabilize a ship or airship
    “The cigars are ballast, sweetheart. Sheer ballast. If he didn’t have a cigar to hold on to, his feet would leave the ground. We’d never see our Zooey again.”
  40. hankering
    a yearning for something or to do something
    You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don’t realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don’t see how you’ll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. ‘Cessation from all hankerings.’
Created on Wed Jan 23 16:19:25 EST 2019 (updated Thu Jan 24 10:14:48 EST 2019)

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