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Main Street: Chapters 20–28

This satire of life in a small town is set in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota in the early 20th century.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Chapters 1–5, Chapters 6–11, Chapters 12–19, Chapters 20–28, Chapters 29–39
40 words 5 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

  1. dilettante
    showing frivolous or superficial interest; amateurish
    “I thought I'd be a dilettante mother, but I'm as dismayingly natural as Mrs. Bogart,” she boasted.
  2. admonish
    scold or reprimand; take to task
    She was delighted when Miles, speaking as one man to another, admonished Hugh, “I wouldn't stand them skirts if I was you. Come on. Join the union and strike. Make 'em give you pants.”
  3. faction
    a clique that seeks power usually through intrigue
    To defend her position against the new Mrs. Terry Gould she sought to attach Carol to her faction by giggling that “SOME folks might call Rita innocent, but I've got a hunch that she isn't half as ignorant of things as brides are supposed to be—and of course Terry isn't one-two-three as a doctor alongside of your husband.”
  4. wayward
    resistant to guidance or discipline
    It is probable that the agitated citizen has within his circle at least one inarticulate rebel with aspirations as wayward as Carol's.
  5. sanctimonious
    excessively or hypocritically pious
    She was born in a hill-smothered Wisconsin village where her father was a prosy minister; she labored through a sanctimonious college; she taught for two years in an iron-range town of blurry-faced Tatars and Montenegrins, and wastes of ore, and when she came to Gopher Prairie, its trees and the shining spaciousness of the wheat prairie made her certain that she was in paradise.
  6. fatuous
    devoid of intelligence
    “Don't you like the poor lonely bachelor?” he yammered in a fatuous way.
  7. bucolic
    idyllically rustic
    She remembered the rector's wife who had been chilly to callers and who was rumored throughout the town to have said, “Re-ah-ly I cawn't endure this bucolic heartiness in the responses.”
  8. mellifluous
    pleasing to the ear
    He hymned the old unhappy wars in which he had been Achilles and the mellifluous Nestor, yet gone his righteous ways unheeded by the cruel kings.
  9. subversive
    in opposition to an established system or government
    They were young American sociologists, young English realists, Russian horrorists; Anatole France, Rolland, Nexo, Wells, Shaw, Key, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Mencken, and all the other subversive philosophers and artists whom women were consulting everywhere, in batik-curtained studios in New York, in Kansas farmhouses, San Francisco drawing-rooms, Alabama schools for negroes.
  10. precipitate
    bring about abruptly
    Certainly her reading precipitated her observations of Main Street, of Gopher Prairie and of the several adjacent Gopher Prairies which she had seen on drives with Kennicott.
  11. facetious
    cleverly amusing in tone
    This altogether admirable tradition rules the vaudeville stage, facetious illustrators, and syndicated newspaper humor, but out of actual life it passed forty years ago.
  12. inane
    devoid of intelligence
    A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.
  13. priggish
    exaggeratedly or self-righteously proper
    To be “intellectual” or “artistic” or, in their own word, to be “highbrow,” is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.
  14. usury
    an exorbitant or unlawful rate of interest
    Finally, behind all her comments, Carol saw the fact that the prairie towns no more exist to serve the farmers who are their reason of existence than do the great capitals; they exist to fatten on the farmers, to provide for the townsmen large motors and social preferment; and, unlike the capitals, they do not give to the district in return for usury a stately and permanent center, but only this ragged camp.
  15. bawdy
    humorously vulgar
    The civic improvements which I'd like the Thanatopsis to advocate are Strindberg plays, and classic dancers—exquisite legs beneath tulle—and (I can see him so clearly!) a thick, black-bearded, cynical Frenchman who would sit about and drink and sing opera and tell bawdy stories and laugh at our proprieties and quote Rabelais and not be ashamed to kiss my hand!
  16. diaphanous
    so thin as to transmit light
    Yet all the while she beheld the burly cynical Frenchman and the diaphanous dancers as clearly as the child sees its air-born playmates; she relished the Camp Fire Girls not because, in Vida's words, “this Scout training will help so much to make them Good Wives,” but because she hoped that the Sioux dances would bring subversive color into their dinginess.
  17. berth
    a position in an organization or event
    You read a lot about his retiring and about his being killed, but I know he's got a big army back of him, and he'll show these damn agitators, lazy beggars hunting for a soft berth bossing the poor goats that fall for 'em, he'll show 'em where they get off!
  18. denizen
    a person who inhabits a particular place
    Do you know that men like you, prominent men, do quite a reasonable amount of harm by insisting that your native towns and native states are perfect? It's you who encourage the denizens not to change.
  19. neophyte
    a participant with no experience with an activity
    He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty to friends. She had the neophyte's shock of discovery that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics.
  20. tract
    a brief treatise on a subject of interest
    He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty to friends. She had the neophyte's shock of discovery that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics.
  21. iconoclast
    someone who attacks cherished ideas or institutions
    He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty to friends.
    She had the neophyte's shock of discovery that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics.
  22. placate
    cause to be more favorably inclined
    His manner of sneering at what he called “parlor socialists” (though the phrase was not overwhelmingly new) had a power which made her wish to placate his company of well-fed, speed-loving administrators.
  23. apocryphal
    being of questionable authenticity
    Fifty times had the mention of Barney Cahoon, the town drayman, like a nickel in a slot produced from Kennicott the apocryphal story of Barney's directing a minister, “Come down to the depot and get your case of religious books—they're leaking!”
  24. solecism
    a socially awkward or tactless act
    But she knew that to her they did matter, these solecisms and mixed tenses of the table.
  25. epicure
    a person who takes great pleasure in fine food and drink
    Because at some more flexible period he had advanced from oranges to grape-fruit he considered himself an epicure.
  26. ingratiating
    calculated to please or gain favor
    Carol smiled upon them ingratiatingly.
  27. mundane
    found in the ordinary course of events
    In the lee of the stonily mature trio Carol proceeded to the street fair which added mundane gaiety to the annual rites of the United and Fraternal Order of Beavers.
  28. adumbrate
    describe roughly or give the main points or summary of
    Calibree adumbrated, “They're a good bunch. Good strong lodge. See that fellow there that's playing the snare drum? He's the smartest wholesale grocer in Duluth, they say. Guess it would be worth joining. Oh say, are you doing much insurance examining?”
  29. levity
    a manner lacking seriousness
    There were the same two-story brick groceries with lodge-signs above the awnings; the same one-story wooden millinery shop; the same fire-brick garages; the same prairie at the open end of the wide street; the same people wondering whether the levity of eating a hot-dog sandwich would break their taboos.
  30. solicitude
    a feeling of excessive concern
    With unusual solicitude he uttered his stock phrase, “Well, what seems to be the matter, Maud?”
  31. inhibition
    the conscious exclusion of unacceptable thoughts or desires
    Why, Good Lord, Maud, I could talk about neuroses and psychoses and inhibitions and repressions and complexes just as well as any damn specialist, if I got paid for it, if I was in the city and had the nerve to charge the fees that those fellows do.
  32. lambent
    softly bright or radiant
    His lambent eyes were stupid, he moaned, he rubbed his forehead.
  33. emaciated
    very thin, especially from disease or hunger or cold
    He was emaciated. His ribs were grim clear lines, his skin was clammy, his pulse was feeble but terrifyingly rapid.
  34. seditious
    inciting action or rebellion
    Some of the people who had been at the station declared that Miles made some dreadful seditious retort: something about loving German workmen more than American bankers; but others asserted that he couldn't find one word with which to answer the veteran; that he merely sneaked up on the platform of the train.
  35. winsome
    charming in a childlike or naive way
    She went into the house, a frail small woman, still winsome but hopeless of eye as she staggered with the weight of the drowsy boy in her arms.
  36. lassitude
    a feeling of lack of interest or energy
    It was a street beyond the end of the world, beyond the boundaries of hope. Though she should sit here forever, no brave procession, no one who was interesting, would be coming by. It was tediousness made tangible, a street builded of lassitude and of futility.
  37. sanguinary
    marked by eagerness to resort to violence and bloodshed
    But when she went to church suppers and felt the friendliness, saw the gaiety with which the sisters served cold ham and scalloped potatoes; when Mrs. Champ Perry cried to her, on an afternoon call, “My dear, if you just knew how happy it makes you to come into abiding grace,” then Carol found the humanness behind the sanguinary and alien theology.
  38. rakish
    marked by up-to-dateness in dress and manners
    She was tall, weedy, pretty, and incurably rakish.
  39. indiscriminately
    without paying attention to differences
    Nat Hicks was socially acceptable; he had been here for years, and owned his shop; but this person was merely Nat's workman, and the town's principle of perfect democracy was not meant to be applied indiscriminately.
  40. dais
    a platform raised above the surrounding level
    Put the breakfast table on a dais.
Created on Wed Sep 15 14:18:28 EDT 2021 (updated Thu Sep 23 13:24:35 EDT 2021)

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