Cat's Eye: Parts 11–15

by Margaret Atwood
When artist Elaine Risley returns to Toronto, the city in which she grew up, she reflects on an intense childhood friendship that ended in betrayal.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Parts 1–5, Parts 6–10, Parts 11–15

Here are links to our lists for The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
35 words 34 learners

Learn words with Flashcards and other activities

Definition First
Print Flashcards

Other learning activities

Answer a few questions about each word. Use this to prep for your next quiz! Compete with other teams in real time to see who answers the most questions correctly! Test your spelling acumen. Read the definition, listen to the word and try spelling it!

Teaching tools

Create and assign quizzes to your students to test their vocabulary. Assign learning activities including Practice, Vocabulary Jams and Spelling Bees to your students, and monitor their progress in real-time.

Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. opulent
    rich and superior in quality
    I turn a corner, onto a side street, a double row of expensive boutiques: hand knits and French maternity outfits and ribbon-covered soaps, imported tobaccos, opulent restaurants where the wineglasses are thin-stemmed and they sell you location and overhead.
  2. irate
    feeling or showing extreme anger
    These are other painters, on the lam from irate landlords or between odd jobs.
  3. exuberant
    unrestrained, especially with regard to feelings
    Jon is big on purity, but only in art: it doesn’t apply to his housekeeping, which is an exuberant protest against all mothers and especially his own.
  4. waylay
    wait in hiding to attack
    Josef waylays me outside the museum and announces I have driven him to despair because of the way I’ve treated him
  5. impasto
    painting that applies the pigment thickly so that brush or palette knife marks are visible
    Art and Archaeology is murkier and more velvety than last year, and filled with impasto and chiaroscuro.
  6. taciturn
    habitually reserved and uncommunicative
    He has become more taciturn: he too now communicates by postcard.
  7. homogeneous
    all of the same or similar kind or nature
    everything up there and indeed everything down here is a fossil, a leftover from the first picoseconds of creation, when the universe crystallized out from the primal homogeneous plasma.
  8. replete
    deeply filled or permeated
    If we could travel in a time machine back toward this explosive moment, we would find ourselves in a universe replete with energies we do not understand and strangely behaving forces distorted beyond recognition.
  9. fiat
    a legally binding command or decision
    Judging from the scanty but mounting evidence now available to us, if the universe was created with a fiat lux, that fiat must have been expressed, not in Latin, but in the one truly universal language: mathematics.
  10. banality
    a trite or obvious remark
    He does not talk about purity any more but of the necessity of using common cultural sign systems to reflect the iconic banality of our times.
  11. capitulation
    the act of surrendering, usually under agreed conditions
    He does not want just capitulation, but admiration, enthusiasm, for himself and his ideas, and when he doesn’t get it he feels cheated.
  12. histrionics
    a deliberate display of emotion for effect
    I begin to see how the line is crossed, between histrionics and murder.
  13. aesthetic
    characterized by an appreciation of beauty or good taste
    She told him that in the Renaissance the most famous dukes were known for their aesthetic taste and patronage of the arts, and this idea appealed to him.
  14. surrealism
    an artistic movement using fantastic and incongruous images
    Compared with the rest of them, I get off easy: “naive surrealism with a twist of feminist lemon.”
  15. culpable
    deserving blame or censure as being wrong or injurious
    She tries to laugh, and I laugh with her, feeling culpable and accused.
  16. threadbare
    thin and tattered with age
    There’s an antique child’s rocking horse in the window, a threadbare quilt, a wooden-headed doll with a battered face.
  17. ethereal
    characterized by unusual lightness and delicacy
    These things wouldn’t have been as appealing if she had been ugly, instead of blond and ethereal.
  18. svelte
    being of delicate or slender build
    Outside, the skyline has changed: the Park Plaza is no longer the tallest building around, but a squat leftover, dwarfed by the svelte glassy towers that rise around it.
  19. oblivion
    the state of being disregarded or forgotten
    I enter sleep angry and dread waking up, and when I do wake I lie beside the sleeping body of Jon, in our bed, listening to the rhythm of his breathing and resenting him for the oblivion he still controls.
  20. feign
    make believe with the intent to deceive
    He comes back late at night and I’m in bed, feigning sleep, my head churning.
  21. subterfuge
    something intended to misrepresent the nature of an activity
    I think of subterfuges: examining his shirts for perfume, tailing him along the street, hiding in the closet and jumping out, red-hot with discovery.
  22. plaintive
    expressing sorrow
    He calls long distance, his voice on the phone fading in and out like a wartime broadcast, plaintive with defeat, with an archaic sadness that seems, more and more, to be that of men in general.
  23. camaraderie
    the quality of affording easy familiarity and sociability
    But also I envy their conviction, their optimism, their carelessness, their fearlessness about men, their camaraderie.
  24. halitosis
    offensive breath
    Two seats over, a fat bald-headed man is snoring with his mouth open, releasing an invisible cloud of halitosis.
  25. unfathomable
    impossible to come to understand
    The expression on his face is one of bemused curiosity: these people are unfathomable, but then so are most.
  26. repository
    a facility where things can be deposited for safekeeping
    It’s the one I remember from our Toronto house; I still think of it as mysterious, the repository of treasure.
  27. malevolent
    wishing or appearing to wish evil to others
    The voices of the children from the playground below could be any children’s voices, from any time, the light under the trees thickens, turns malevolent.
  28. charismatic
    possessing an extraordinary ability to attract
    “Early forays by Risley into the realm of female symbolism and the charismatic nature of domestic objects,” says Charna.
  29. feckless
    generally incompetent and ineffectual
    Now I can see myself, through these painted eyes of Mrs. Smeath: a frazzle-headed ragamuffin from heaven knows where, a gypsy practically, with a heathen father and a feckless mother who traipsed around in slacks and gathered weeds.
  30. pastiche
    a work of art that imitates the style of some previous work
    ‘‘A jeu d’esprit," says Charna, “which takes on the Group of Seven and reconstructs their vision of landscape in the light of contemporary experiment and postmodern pastiche.”
  31. reminiscent
    serving to bring to mind
    He is wearing a richly worked gold and red oriental costume reminiscent of Balthazar’s in Jan Gossaert’s Adoration of the Magi, but without the crown and scarf.
  32. servile
    submissive or fawning in attitude or behavior
    Soon the door will open, and in will crowd a horde of snide and treacherous little girls, whispering and pointing, and I will be servile, grateful.
  33. dour
    showing a brooding ill humor
    Maybe that warmth is genuine, maybe I should be ashamed of my dour, cynical thoughts.
  34. relegate
    assign to a lower position
    She doesn’t mean to be cruel, she doesn’t know she’s just relegated me to the dust heap along with crank telephones and whalebone stays.
  35. bravado
    a swaggering show of courage
    In the two seats beside me are two old ladies, old women, each with a knitted cardigan, each with yellowy-white hair and thick-lensed glasses with a chain for around the neck, each with a desiccated mouth lipsticked bright red with bravado.
Created on Thu Jun 05 21:44:05 EDT 2014 (updated Mon Sep 24 16:56:14 EDT 2018)

Sign up now (it’s free!)

Whether you’re a teacher or a learner, Vocabulary.com can put you or your class on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement.