Unit 2: Vocabulary from Readings 2

Because of nervousness, impatience, or obtuseness, performances vary in the handling of the code (which is what we call this method of transcribing my thoughts).

Indeed, I wonder what conclusions anthropologists of the year 3000 will reach if they ever chance to leaf through these notebooks, where haphazardly scribbled remarks like “The physical therapist is pregnant,” “Mainly on the legs,” “Arthur Rimbaud,” and “The French team played like pigs” are interspersed with unintelligible gibberish, misspelled words, lost letters, omitted syllables.

Reticent people are much more difficult. If I ask them, “How are you?” they answer, “Fine,” immediately putting the ball back in my court.

Meticulous people never go wrong: they scrupulously note down each letter and never seek to unravel the mystery of a sentence before it is complete.

On the first occasion, my emotions got the better of me when my ambulance happened to pass the ultra modern high-rise where I once followed the reprehensible calling of editor in chief of a famous women’s magazine.

Our baggage was inspected for contraband, a cursory medical check made, and our living quarters assigned.

That the stalls should have been called “apartments” was a euphemism so ludicrous it was comical.

The space, while perhaps a good source of ventilation for the horses, deprived us of all but visual privacy, and we couldn’t even be sure of that because of the crevices and knotholes in the dividing walls.

As we stood in what seemed a bread line for the destitute, I felt degraded, humiliated, and overwhelmed with a longing for home.

“What ya got in here anyway?” they shouted good-naturedly as they struggled with the unwieldy bundle. “It’s the biggest thing we got on our truck!”

It was, in fact, communal living, with semiprivate cubicles provided only for sleeping.

During the first few weeks of camp life, everything was erratic and in short supply.

The shock of the evacuation compounded by the short supply of every necessity brought out the baser instincts of the internees, and there was little inclination for anyone to feel responsible for anyone else.

The shock of the evacuation compounded by the short supply of every necessity brought out the baser instincts of the internees, and there was little inclination for anyone to feel responsible for anyone else.

To assuage our disappointment, a friend and I went to the main mess hall, which was still in operation, to see if it had anything better.