Unit 3: Vocabulary from Readings 1

She was thin without the taut look of wiry people, and her printed voile dresses and flowered hats were as right for her as denim overalls for a farmer.

When she chose to smile on me, I always wanted to thank her. The action was so graceful and inclusively benign.

As I left I would hear the beginning of an intimate conversation. Momma persistently using the wrong verb, or none at all.

Since everyone we knew (except Mrs. Flowers, of course) could sew competently, praise was rarely handed out for the commonly practiced craft.

“Your grandmother says you read a lot. Every chance you get. That’s good, but not good enough. Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.”

The wild man was emaciated to starvation, his hair was burned off close to his head, he was naked except for a ragged scrap of ancient covered-wagon canvas which he wore around his shoulders like a poncho.

Until Sheriff Webber took the unwonted measure of keeping them out by force people filled the jail to gaze through the bars of his cell at the captive.

Or he may have felt that it was unkind to recall his suspicions which proved in the event groundless, for Ishi expected in those first days to be put to death.

The guess was based on field work with Indians all up and down California; they knew that Oroville was adjacent to country which formerly belonged to the Yana Indians; presumably the strange Indian would be a Yana.

But increasingly, a wall separates each of us from the world outside, and from others who have taken refuge in their own private sanctuaries.

It’s hard to comprehend the moral implications of a world in which Nike pays Michael Jordan millions to appear in its ads while workers at its foreign shoe factories toil away for pennies a day.

Pete Knutson is one of my oldest friends. During 25 years as a commercial fisherman in Washington and Alaska, he has been forced to respond to the steady degradation of salmon spawning grounds.

The magnitude of the issues at hand has led too many of us to conclude that social involvement isn’t worth the cost.

Proliferation of information makes it even more likely that we’ll use the perfect standard to justify detachment rather than seek the knowledge we need to get involved.