"By Any Other Name"

Another name for Santha Rama Rau was "Cynthia" but that only lasted a week. As a five and a half year old, the author had trouble remembering the new name, but she shows how this incident affected her enough to be worth writing about years later in a memoir.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 10 Unit 1's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: What Is Cultural Identity, Ethnic Hash, Two Kinds, Honestly Frida, Legal Alien, By Any Other Name, HAPA, Where Worlds Collide, My Mother Pieced Quilts, Everyday Use, Two Ways to Belong in America, An Indian Father's Plea
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. cope
    come to terms with
    The headmistress had been in India, I suppose, fifteen years or so, but she still smiled her helpless inability to cope with Indian names.
  2. precarious
    not secure; beset with difficulties
    Her rimless half-glasses glittered, and the precarious bun on the top of her head trembled as she shook her head.
  3. baffled
    perplexed by many conflicting situations or statements
    She shrugged in a baffled way at my sister.
  4. intimidated
    made scared or fearful as by threats
    My sister was always less easily intimidated than I was, and while she kept a stubborn silence, I said, "Thank you," in a very tiny voice.
  5. insular
    narrowly restricted in outlook or scope
    you can take a Britisher away from his home for a lifetime and he still remains insular
  6. Hindi
    the most widely spoken of modern Indic vernaculars
    So our Hindi books were put away, the stories of the Lord Krishna as a little boy were left in mid-air, and we were sent to the Anglo-Indian school.
  7. dual
    consisting of two parts or components, usually in pairs
    At that age, if one's name is changed, one develops a curious form of dual personality.
  8. kohl
    a cosmetic preparation used by women in Egypt and Arabia to darken the edges of their eyelids
    Like most Indian children, she had a rim of black kohl around her eyes.
  9. palpitate
    shake with fast, tremulous movements
    Occasionally it would shoot out its long yellow tongue for a fly, and then it would rest, with its eyes closed and its belly palpitating as though it were swallowing several times quickly.
  10. incomprehensible
    difficult to understand
    The teacher wrote on the easel blackboard words like "bat" and "cat," which seemed babyish to me; only "apple" was new and incomprehensible.
  11. chapati
    flat pancake-like bread cooked on a griddle
    Premila and I were the only ones who had Indian food--thin wheat chapatis, some vegetable curry, and a bottle of buttermilk.
  12. ayah
    (in India) a native nursemaid who looks after children
    finally, the shrill, fussy voice of the ayah waking one for tea
  13. courtesy
    a polite, respectful, or considerate act
    When we played twos-and-threes that afternoon at school, in accordance with my training, I let one of the small English boys catch me, but was naturally rather puzzled when the other children did not return the courtesy.
  14. sari
    a draped dress worn primarily by Hindu women
    It seemed like an eternity since I had seen her that morning--a wizened, affectionate figure in her white cotton sari, giving me dozens of urgent and useless instructions on how to be a good girl at school.
  15. abruptly
    quickly and without warning
    It was a week later, the day of Premila's first test, that our lives changed rather abruptly.
  16. rigid
    fixed and unmoving
    She stood with her feet planted firmly apart and her shoulders rigid, and addressed herself directly to me.
  17. crisis
    an unstable situation of extreme danger or difficulty
    I didn't know what had happened, but I was aware that it was a crisis of some sort.
  18. trudge
    walk heavily and firmly, as when weary, or through mud
    Occasionally a horse-drawn tonga passed us, and the women, in their pink or green silks, stared at Premila and me trudging along on the side of the road.
  19. peevishness
    a cranky, irritable, or petulant feeling or disposition
    I walked more and more slowly, and shouted to Premila, from time to time, "Wait for me!" with increasing peevishness.
  20. particularly
    to a distinctly greater extent or degree than is common
    But I put it happily away, because it had all happened to a girl called Cynthia, and I never was really particularly interested in her.
Created on Tue Oct 07 13:20:44 EDT 2014 (updated Wed Oct 08 18:16:18 EDT 2014)

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