Angela's Ashes: Chapters 1–2

by Frank McCourt
After the death of their daughter, Frank McCourt's impoverished immigrant parents decide to return to Ireland. With humor and tenderness, this Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir tells the story of his early life there.

Here are links to our lists for the book: Chapters 1–2, Chapters 3–6, Chapters 7–10, Chapters 11–14, Chapters 15–19
12 words 1422 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. shiftless
    lacking ambition or initiative
    People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.
  2. loquacious
    full of trivial conversation
    People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.
  3. pompous
    puffed up with vanity
    People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.
  4. cacophony
    loud confusing disagreeable sounds
    It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks.
    The alliteration in this sentence — that is, the repetition of the hard "c"
    — echoes the sound of coughing that the sentence describes.
  5. atrocious
    exceptionally bad or displeasing
    Sticking on middle names was an atrocious American habit and there was no need for a second name when you’re christened after the man from Assisi.
  6. immersion
    a form of baptism in which a person's body is submerged
    Angela, new mother, agitated, forgot she was holding the child and let him slip into the baptismal font, a total immersion of the Protestant type.
  7. beholden
    under a moral obligation to someone
    When Dad brings home the first week’s wages Mam is delighted she can pay the lovely Italian man in the grocery shop and she can hold her head up again because there’s nothing worse in the world than to owe and be beholden to anyone.
  8. mien
    a person's appearance, manner, or demeanor
    Because he loved the Motherland,
    Because he loved the Green,
    He goes to meet the martyr's fate
    With proud and joyous mien.
  9. cavort
    play boisterously
    I want to ask him what he’s talking about for even if I’m bursting I feel strange peeing into a pot with roses and maidens cavorting, whatever they are.
  10. perfidy
    an act of deliberate betrayal
    He says you’ll see the bullet holes all over the front and they should be left there to remind the Irish of English perfidy.
  11. saunter
    walk leisurely and with no apparent aim
    ...the first thing you noticed was a scarcity of gray hairs, all the gray hairs either in the graveyard or across the Atlantic working on railroads or sauntering around in police uniforms.
  12. squander
    spend thoughtlessly; throw away
    If you didn’t squander the money in the pubs I wouldn’t have to follow you the way I did in Brooklyn.
Created on Fri Mar 15 14:45:37 EDT 2013 (updated Wed Jul 16 14:48:02 EDT 2025)

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