Whirligig: List 3

by Paul Fleischman
After nearly dying in a car crash, Brent Bishop takes a cross-country trip to help heal his emotional wounds.

This list covers “Apprentices” to “Everybody Swing!”

Here are links to our lists for the novel: List 1, List 2, List 3
35 words 175 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. troupe
    an organization of performers and associated personnel
    A full moon stage-lit the desert and revealed a troupe of saguaro cactuses.
  2. soliloquy
    speech you make to yourself
    They were strangely human, their thick arms gesturing, each in the midst of a silent soliloquy.
  3. declaim
    recite in a skilled and formal way
    A few doors down, a sidewalk preacher was declaiming.
  4. vagabond
    a wanderer with no established residence or means of support
    “‘...A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth,’” he shouted out.
  5. proliferate
    cause to grow or increase rapidly
    The billboards announcing the Key Lime Pie Belt first appeared in Alabama, then proliferated across the Florida line.
  6. bracing
    refreshing or invigorating
    When he’d lived in Atlanta they’d come to Florida, to Palm Beach, on the Atlantic side, where the waves had been monstrous and the water bracing.
  7. frond
    compound leaf of a fern or palm or cycad
    He looked around, then collected palm fronds, stood on one of the tables, and stretched to lay them across the metal bars, feeling as resourceful as Robinson Crusoe.
  8. bluff
    a high steep bank
    He heard an occasional car on the beachfront road, hidden by trees and a bluff.
  9. deluge
    a heavy rain
    When the wind kicked up and blew off half his fronds, the sky darkened, and a sudden deluge soaked him, he wondered if he was the storm’s only witness.
  10. painstaking
    characterized by extreme care and great effort
    He decided to make Lea the clarinetist, painstakingly sawed out the figure, then ate the sub he’d brought.
  11. stifling
    characterized by oppressive heat and humidity
    It was already stifling by the time he returned to his workplace the next morning. His fronds blocked the sun, his repellent turned back the mosquitoes, but there was no escape from humidity.
  12. undertaking
    any piece of work that is attempted
    The outlandishness and mystery of his undertaking suddenly struck him afresh. His eyes lost their focus on his work.
  13. poised
    marked by balance or equilibrium and readiness for action
    He worked the southern sky, glancing between his book and the heavens, and added Scorpius to his list, with its poised, potent, sickle-shaped tail and the red star Antares at its heart.
  14. potent
    having or wielding force or authority
    He worked the southern sky, glancing between his book and the heavens, and added Scorpius to his list, with its poised, potent, sickle-shaped tail and the red star Antares at its heart.
  15. brooch
    a decorative pin
    From her heavy, claw-footed dresser I got the gold brooch that she asked for.
  16. marquee
    a structure, often with a signboard, over an entrance
    I caught “Tom Cruise” on the same marquee that had probably advertised Charlie Chaplin.
  17. rook
    a castle-shaped chess piece that moves in a straight line
    Though his last name was Bishop, Brent felt like a rook, riding north on I-95, making another end-to-end chess move along the country’s perimeter.
  18. replenish
    fill something that had previously been emptied
    A series of signs led him toward the camp, taking him past a small grocery, where he stopped to replenish his food supply.
  19. palpable
    capable of being perceived
    The past was palpable here, a feeling that deepened when he detoured through the cemetery and found a slate headstone dated 1798.
  20. respective
    considered individually
    He opened a paper to the weather page, studied the national map, then checked the details for Seattle, San Diego, and Tampa. He pictured his whirligigs in their respective weathers.
  21. jest
    act in a funny or teasing way
    The man gave no sign of jesting.
  22. raucous
    unpleasantly loud and harsh
    A blue jay perched nearby, raucously panhandling him.
  23. panhandle
    beg for money from people on the street
    A blue jay perched nearby, raucously panhandling him.
  24. materialize
    come into being; become reality
    But in his mind there materialized the notion of a whirligig all his own, its plan found in no book in the world, its ingredients his remaining scraps and whatever he could scavenge, as the campground owner had.
  25. clamber
    climb awkwardly, as if by scrambling
    Coming to the end of the cove, he clambered up onto great slabs of granite and crossed them until he reached another beach.
  26. latitude
    angular distance between the equator and a parallel line
    Riding north from Florida, he’d covered twenty degrees of latitude.
  27. avail
    use to one's advantage
    He slipped the red cellophane over his flashlight, opened his book to “Circumpolar Stars,” and availed himself of his new view.
  28. motif
    a recurrent element in a literary or artistic work
    The pinwheels on the front, snipped and fashioned from soda cans, stood becalmed. Likewise the dozen propellers made from golf-motif coasters, linoleum scraps, license plates, and lobster-trap slats.
  29. rendition
    the act of expressing something in an artistic performance
    He considered the plywood rendition of her face. It was the most faithful of the four he’d made.
  30. predominate
    be larger in number, quantity, power, status or importance
    Maine summers, like dawn colors, were brief. Darkness and winter predominated.
  31. decrepit
    worn and broken down by hard use
    An hour later Brent had removed a decrepit birdhouse from a metal pole and mounted the whirligig in its place.
  32. sultry
    characterized by oppressive heat and humidity
    Cicadas droned in the sultry air.
  33. spiel
    artful or slick talk used to persuade
    The caller’s promptings, like an auctioneer’s spiel, seemed almost to be in a foreign language.
  34. exalt
    fill with sublime emotion
    The galloping tune had an Irish feel. It was exalting to be part of the twining and twirling, and strangely thrilling to touch other hands and to feel them grasping his.
  35. myriad
    too numerous to be counted
    The world itself was a whirligig, its myriad parts invisibly linked, the hidden crankshafts and connecting rods carrying motion across the globe and over the centuries.
Created on Sun Sep 06 15:54:18 EDT 2020 (updated Tue Sep 08 13:46:11 EDT 2020)

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