Hunger of Memory: Chapter 4

by Richard Rodriguez
In this memoir, Richard Rodriguez considers the ways in which his education isolated him from his family, background, and culture.

Here are links to our lists for the memoir: Prologue–Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. tawny
    having the color of tanned leather
    More exactly, terra-cotta in sunlight, tawny in shade.
  2. perpetual
    continuing forever or indefinitely
    But with time his face has sagged to a perpetual sigh.
  3. inexplicable
    incapable of being explained or accounted for
    My mother, whose surname is inexplicably Irish—Moran—has an olive complexion.
  4. mournful
    filled with or evoking sadness
    My face is mournfully long, in the classical Indian manner; my profile suggests one of those beak-nosed Mayan sculptures—the eagle-like face upturned, open-mouthed, against the deserted, primitive sky.
  5. elixir
    a substance believed to cure all ills
    One aunt prescribed to her sisters the elixir of large doses of castor oil during the last weeks of pregnancy.
  6. imbue
    fill or soak totally
    Imbued with the mysterious kindness of children, my friends would never ask later why I hadn’t yelled out in my own defense.
  7. prominent
    having a quality that thrusts itself into attention
    I followed the progress of the southern black civil rights movement, which was gaining prominent notice in Sacramento’s afternoon newspaper.
  8. intrigue
    cause to be interested or curious
    But what most intrigued me was the connection between dark skin and poverty.
  9. hauteur
    overbearing pride with a superior manner toward inferiors
    There is to their pose an aristocratic formality, an elegant Latin hauteur.
  10. dapper
    marked by up-to-dateness in dress and manners
    The dapper young man in the old photographs yielded to the man I saw after dinner: haggard, asleep on the sofa.
  11. foresee
    picture to oneself; imagine possible
    Already my mother would admit to foreseeing herself in her own mother, a woman grown old, bald and bowlegged, after a hard lifetime of working.
  12. appraise
    estimate the nature, quality, ability or significance of
    But it was really the vast polished dining room table I’d come to appraise.
  13. buoyant
    characterized by liveliness and lightheartedness
    Smiling, his voice sounded, buoyant, calling me to swim to him.
  14. vulnerable
    susceptible to attack
    Nor did my complexion make me feel especially vulnerable to racial abuse.
  15. propel
    cause to move forward with force
    The normal, extraordinary, animal excitement of feeling my body alive—riding shirtless on a bicycle in the warm wind created by furious self-propelled motion—the sensations that first had excited in me a sense of my maleness, I denied.
  16. taboo
    a ban resulting from social custom or emotional aversion
    I envied them their physical lives, their freedom to violate the taboo of the sun.
  17. machismo
    exaggerated masculinity
    Machismo was a word never exactly defined by the persons who used it.
  18. audible
    heard or perceptible by the ear
    In distress, women always sounded quick ejaculations to God or the Virgin; women prayed in clearly audible voices at a wake held in a funeral parlor.
  19. evade
    escape, either physically or mentally
    Even today, when so much about the myth of the macho no longer concerns me, I cannot altogether evade such notions.
  20. skepticism
    doubt about the truth of something
    And although he seemed to regard me with skepticism, he decided to give me a try.
  21. tedious
    so lacking in interest as to cause mental weariness
    But it was never as tedious as my friends had warned me it would be.
  22. subdued
    softened in tone
    Other days the talk at lunchtime was subdued; men gathered in separate groups.
  23. debris
    the remains of something that has been destroyed
    They were employed to cut down some trees and haul off debris.
  24. torso
    the body excluding the head and neck and limbs
    The torso, the soccer player’s calves and thighs, the arms of the twenty-year-old I never was, I possess now in my thirties.
  25. context
    the set of facts or circumstances that surround a situation
    That is only to say that my complexion assumes its significance from the context of my life.
Created on Mon Jun 09 20:54:18 EDT 2014 (updated Thu Aug 30 10:23:18 EDT 2018)

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