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Educated: Chapters 4–8

In this acclaimed memoir, Tara Westover recounts growing up in the remote mountains of Idaho with her survivalist parents.

Here are links to our lists for the memoir: Prologue–Chapter 3, Chapters 4–8, Chapters 9–16, Chapters 17–23, Chapters 24–29, Chapters 30–40
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Full list of words from this list:

  1. sacrilege
    blasphemous behavior
    When Dad wasn’t around, I’d heard her say things that he—or at least this new incarnation of him—would have called sacrilege, things like, “Herbs are supplements. For something serious, you should go to a doctor.”
  2. sorrel
    of a light brownish color
    Like the sandstone altar on which they had died, the shape of their lives had been determined years before—before the horses began their gallop, their sorrel bodies arching for that final collision.
  3. extrude
    form or shape by forcing through an opening
    I’d seen hundreds of shattered windshields in the junkyard, each one unique, with its particular spray of gossamer extruding from the point of impact, a chronicle of the collision.
  4. tumid
    abnormally distended especially by fluids or gas
    Every night I was sure her face was as marked and deformed as it was possible for a face to be, but every morning it was somehow darker, more tumid.
  5. expound
    add details to clarify an idea
    Dad had begun to expound a scripture when Tyler cleared his throat and said he was leaving.
  6. impassive
    deliberately unexpressive
    Everyone looked at Dad. His expression was folded, impassive. The silence was worse than shouting.
  7. frivolous
    not serious in content, attitude, or behavior
    Grandma was even worse, Dad said. She was frivolous.
  8. supplication
    the act of communicating with a deity
    Muscle testing, she explained to me, was a kind of prayer, a divine supplication.
  9. rapturous
    feeling great delight
    Dad was rapturous. “Them doctors can’t tell what’s wrong just by touching you,” he said, glowing. “But Mother can!”
  10. affront
    a deliberately offensive act
    There was something in the hard line of my father’s face, in the quiet sigh of supplication he made every morning before he began family prayer, that made me think my curiosity was an obscenity, an affront to all he’d sacrificed to raise me.
  11. treatise
    a formal text that treats a particular topic systematically
    While the stories were vivid, the lectures were abstract, treatises on obscure philosophical subjects, and it was to these abstractions that I devoted most of my study.
  12. parse
    analyze the sentence structure of
    In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me.
  13. salve
    a preparation applied externally as a soothing remedy
    Mother dressed the leg in mullein and comfrey salve, her own recipe.
  14. torrid
    extremely hot
    The few times my reminiscing carried me back to that torrid afternoon, what I remembered first was the belt.
  15. gentile
    a person who does not acknowledge your god
    There was scarcely a person in the church that Dad hadn’t called a gentile—for visiting a doctor or for sending their kids to the public school—but that day he seemed to forget about California socialism and the Illuminati.
Created on Wed Jan 23 15:50:22 EST 2019 (updated Mon Jul 28 12:28:42 EDT 2025)

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