Unit 9: Vocabulary from Readings 2

I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language—the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.

You should know that my mother’s expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands.

And sure enough, the following week there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.

My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month ago.

I had been living abroad almost a year then on an NEA grant, subsisting mainly on French bread and lentils while in France so that my money could last longer.

There were rules involved here, unlike writing a poem or story, which I did intuitively.

I had broken a terrible taboo.

It was the only constant in our nomadic ramblings from one Chicago flat to another.

The house on Destiny Street, Number 12, in the colonia Tepeyac, would be perhaps the only home I knew, and that nostalgia for a home would be a theme that would obsess me.

Away to the headwaters of the Missouri, now quelled by many impoundment dams, and to the headwaters of the Platte, and to the almost invisible headwaters of the slurped-up Arkansas!

It makes sense that traditional finance would balk there, because the Great Plains don’t exactly qualify as real estate.