Franny and Zooey: List 2

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 41–101 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 13 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. odium
    hate coupled with disgust
    The facts at hand presumably speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do. As a counterbalance, then, we begin with that everfresh and exciting odium: the author’s formal introduction.
  2. languid
    lacking spirit or liveliness
    We’ll take the leading lady first, who, I believe, would prefer to be briefly described as a languid, sophisticated type.
  3. svelte
    being of delicate or slender build
    The other lady of the ensemble, a svelte twilight soubrette, objects to my having, so to speak, photographed her in her old housecoat.
  4. remonstrate
    censure severely or angrily
    They know from experience that I burst into tears at the first harsh or remonstrative word.
  5. esoteric
    understandable only by an enlightened inner circle
    We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.
  6. parochial
    narrowly restricted in outlook or scope
    A more general and surely less parochial view was that his face had been just barely saved from too-handsomeness, not to say gorgeousness, by virtue of one ear’s protruding slightly more than the other.
  7. glib
    marked by lack of intellectual depth
    I submit that Zooey’s face was close to being a wholly beautiful face. As such, it was of course vulnerable to the same variety of glibly undaunted and usually specious evaluations that any legitimate art object is.
  8. specious
    plausible but false
    I submit that Zooey’s face was close to being a wholly beautiful face. As such, it was of course vulnerable to the same variety of glibly undaunted and usually specious evaluations that any legitimate art object is.
  9. confound
    be confusing or perplexing to
    But what was undiminishable, and, as already so flatly suggested, a joy of a kind forever, was an authentic esprit superimposed over his entire face—especially at the eyes, where it was often as arresting as a Harlequin mask, and, on occasion, much more confounding.
  10. parlance
    a manner of speaking natural to a language's native speakers
    The second-eldest child, Buddy, was what is known in campus-catalogue parlance as “writer-in-residence” at a girls’ junior college in upper New York State.
  11. aplomb
    great coolness and composure under strain
    For all the gaps and years between their individual heydays on the program, it may be said (with few, and no really important, reservations) that all seven of the children had managed to answer over the air a prodigious number of alternately deadly-bookish and deadly-cute questions—sent in by listeners—with a freshness, an aplomb, that was considered unique in commercial radio.
  12. precocious
    characterized by exceptionally early development
    The main purpose of the five tests, one gathered, was to isolate and study, if possible, the source of Zooey’s precocious wit and fancy.
  13. waggish
    witty or joking
    Some six weeks later, a long-distance call came through from Boston at eleven-thirty at night, with much dropping of small coins in an ordinary pay phone, and an unidentified voice—with no intention, presumably, of sounding pedantically waggish—informed Mr. and Mrs. Glass that their son Zooey, at twelve, had an English vocabulary on an exact par with Mary Baker Eddy’s, if he could be urged to use it.
  14. surfeit
    the state of being more than full
    The letter itself was virtually endless in length, overwritten, teaching, repetitious, opinionated, remonstrative, condescending, embarrassing—and filled, to a surfeit, with affection.
  15. doting
    extravagantly or foolishly loving and indulgent
    It isn’t enough to treat her with the doting brutality of an apache dancer toward his partner—which she understands, incidentally, whether you think so or not.
  16. sentimentality
    extravagant or affected feeling or emotion
    You forget that she thrives on sentimentality almost as much as Les does.
  17. pedagogical
    relating to the study of teaching
    One, I was a proper snob in college, as only an old Wise Child alumnus and future lifetime English-major can be, and I didn’t want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.
  18. aesthete
    one who professes great sensitivity to the beauty of art
    The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die.
  19. nuance
    a subtle difference in meaning or opinion or attitude
    Will you be content with that standard box-office schmalz? Or will you dream of something a little more cosmic—zum Beispiel, playing Pierre or Andrey in a Technicolor production of War and Peace, with stunning battlefield scenes, and all the nuances of characterization left out...
  20. idiosyncrasy
    a behavioral attribute peculiar to an individual
    You may have seen “inspired” productions, “competent” productions, but never anything beautiful. Never one where Chekhov’s talent is matched, nuance for nuance, idiosyncrasy for idiosyncrasy, by every soul onstage.
  21. plaintive
    expressing sorrow
    The point is, I’m now on the campus five days a week instead of four, and what with my own work at nights and on weekends, I have almost no time to do any elective thinking. Which is my plaintive way of saying that I do worry about you and Franny when I get a chance, but not nearly so often as I’d like to.
  22. parse
    analyze the sentence structure of
    That is, we wanted you both to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao-tse and Shankaracharya and Huineng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree or the definition of a peninsula or how to parse a sentence.
  23. mercurial
    liable to sudden unpredictable change
    He tapped the pages, to even them out, against his dry knees. He frowned. Then, mercurially, as though he’d read the letter, by God, for the last time in his life, he stuffed it like so much excelsior into its envelope.
  24. importunate
    making persistent or urgent requests
    Zooey’s reading was suddenly interrupted by his mother’s voice—importunate, quasi-constructive—addressing him from outside the bathroom door: “Zooey? Are you still in the tub?”
  25. implacable
    incapable of being appeased or pacified
    His voice had no conspicuous actor’s mannerisms, but it was rather excessively vibrant; it “carried” implacably when he had no interest in controlling it.
  26. progeny
    the immediate descendants of a person
    She closed the door behind her instantly, as someone does who has been waging a long, long war on behalf of her progeny against post-bath drafts.
  27. hoary
    ancient
    She was wearing her usual at-home vesture—what her son Buddy (who was a writer, and consequently, as Kafka, no less, has told us, not a nice man) called her pre-notification-of-death uniform. It consisted mostly of a hoary midnight-blue Japanese kimono.
  28. overwrought
    deeply agitated especially from emotion
    I don’t happen to see any comparison whatsoever between the Lord and a run-down, overwrought little college girl that’s been reading too many religious books and all like that!
  29. tenable
    based on sound reasoning or evidence
    Distinctly, her way of holding it tended to blow to some sort of literary hell one’s first, strong (and still perfectly tenable) impression that an invisible Dubliner’s shawl covered her shoulders.
  30. comely
    very pleasing to the eye
    There was the rather eyebrow-raising fact of Bessie Glass’s legs, which were comely by any criterion. They were the legs of a once quite widely acknowledged public beauty, a vaudevillian, a dancer, a very light dancer.
  31. spurious
    intended to deceive
    She stood in the doorway, a few feet behind him, one hand on the doorknob—a portrait of spurious hesitancy about making another full entrance into the room.
  32. affectation
    a deliberate pretense or exaggerated display
    Zooey gave a genuine roar of laughter, as if he clearly relished seeing any affectation brought to light, his own included.
  33. ingratiate
    gain favor with somebody by deliberate efforts
    He was building me up at Franny’s expense. For absolutely no reason except to ingratiate himself and show off his hot little Ivy League intellect.
  34. equable
    not easily irritated
    “He’s a young boy not out of college yet. And you make people nervous, young man,” she said—most equably, for her.
  35. bromide
    a trite or obvious remark
    Not just with objective wonder at the rising of a truth, fragmentary or not, up through what often seemed to be an impenetrable mass of prejudices, clichés, and bromides. But with admiration, affection, and, not least, gratitude.
  36. obstreperous
    noisily and stubbornly defiant
    He put his razor on the edge of the washbowl, but it slid obstreperously down into the bowl.
  37. ablution
    the act of washing oneself, as for ritual purposes
    “I mean it. Lemme finish my goddam ablutions in peace, please.” His eyes closed again, and he appeared ready to have another try at pushing the washbowl through the floor.
  38. non sequitur
    a reply that has no relevance to what preceded it
    “I wish you’d get married,” Mrs. Glass said, abruptly, wistfully.
    Everyone in the Glass family—Zooey certainly not least—was familiar with this sort of nonsequitur from Mrs. Glass.
  39. eclectic
    selecting what seems best of various styles or ideas
    If she got somebody terribly Freudian, or terribly eclectic, or just terribly run-of-the-mill—somebody who didn’t even have any crazy, mysterious gratitude for his insight and intelligence—she’d come out of analysis in even worse shape than Seymour did.
  40. captious
    tending to find and call attention to faults
    “I wish you’d learn to put the caps back on things properly when you’re finished using them,” she said in a tone she fully meant to sound captious.
Created on Wed Jan 23 09:08:28 EST 2019 (updated Thu Jan 24 10:01:35 EST 2019)

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