"I've got a few pet peeves about sea creatures"

Using humor to comment on social issues, Dave Barry won a Pulitzer Prize for his column in the Miami Herald. In an essay, he shows how "pet" is more of an adjective for "peeve" than a cuddly noun or verb. Get a grip on his gripes with this list.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 8 Unit 4's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: Made You Laugh, Brothers, Pet Peeves, Underfunded Schools Forced to Cut, The Open Window, A Day's Work, They Have Yarns, Mooses, Is Traffic Jam Delectable?, The Power of Pets, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Fear Busters
15 words 50 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. reside
    live in
    But my excitement was not shared by Scooter, who, despite residing in a tropical paradise, never did anything except mope around.
  2. vital
    manifesting or characteristic of life
    He moped in one place without moving, or even blinking, for days on end, displaying basically the same vital signs as an ashtray.
  3. decompose
    break down
    Eventually I would realize--it wasn't easy to tell--that Scooter had passed on to that Big Pond in the Sky, and I'd bury him in the garden, where he'd decompose and become food for the zucchini, which in turn would be eaten by my dad
  4. expire
    pass from physical life
    She put Marvin into a Tupperware container, where, under Sophie's loving care and feeding, he thrived for maybe nine seconds before expiring like a little six-legged parking meter.
  5. intensive
    characterized by a heightened level or degree
    Fortunately, we have a beetle-intensive patio, so, unbeknownst to Sophie, we were able to replace Marvin with a parade of stand-ins of various sizes
  6. tedious
    so lacking in interest as to cause mental weariness
    But it gets to be tedious, going out early every morning to wrangle patio beetles.
  7. torso
    the body excluding the head and neck and limbs
    They got some disease like Mongolian Fin Rot, which left them basically just little pooping torsos.
  8. reliable
    worthy of being depended on
    But I figured that today, with all the technological advances we have such as cellular phones and "digital" things and carbohydrate-free toothpaste, modern fish would be more reliable.
  9. stimulate
    cause to be alert and energetic
    So we got an aquarium and prepared it with special water and special gravel and special fake plants and a special scenic rock so the fish would be intellectually stimulated and get into a decent college.
  10. hardy
    having rugged physical strength
    When everything was ready I went to the aquarium store to buy fish, my only criteria being that they should be 1) hardy digital fish; and 2) fish that looked a LOT like other fish, in case God forbid we had to Marvinize them.
  11. complex
    complicated in structure
    This is when I discovered how complex fish society is.
  12. aggressive
    characteristic of an enemy or one eager to fight
    "Those are great fish but they do get aggressive when they mate."
  13. recurring
    coming back
    This was a recurring theme.
  14. violence
    a turbulent state resulting in injuries and destruction
    It turns out that an aquarium is a powder keg that can explode in deadly violence at any moment, just like the Middle East, or junior high school.
  15. pacifist
    someone opposed to violence as a means of settling disputes
    After much thought, the aquarium guy was able to find me three totally pacifist fish--Barney Fife fish, fish so nonviolent that, in the wild, worms routinely beat them up and steal their lunch money.
Created on Tue Sep 15 15:21:01 EDT 2015 (updated Wed Sep 16 02:24:28 EDT 2015)

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