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Selected Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor: "Everything That Rises Must Converge"

A recent college graduate and his mother go on an outing that forces them to reconsider their views of the world and each other.
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Full list of words from this list:

  1. jaunty
    having a cheerful, lively, and self-confident air
    He decided it was less comical than jaunty and pathetic.
  2. florid
    inclined to a healthy reddish color
    Two wings of gray hair protruded on either side of her florid face, but her eyes, sky-blue, were as innocent and untouched by experience as they must have been when she was ten.
  3. bulbous
    rounded and bulging
    The sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike.
  4. surmount
    be on top of
    The door closed and he turned to find the dumpy figure, surmounted by the atrocious hat, coming toward him.
  5. dingy
    gloomy or depressing
    “Will you look around you,” he said tensely, “and see where you are now?” and he swept his arm jerkily out to indicate the neighborhood, which the growing darkness at least made less dingy.
  6. threadbare
    thin and tattered with age
    He preferred its threadbare elegance to anything he could name and it was because of it that all the neighborhoods they had lived in had been a torment to him — whereas she had hardly known the difference.
  7. protruding
    extending out above or beyond a surface or boundary
    A thin woman with protruding teeth and long yellow hair was sitting on the end of it.
  8. discreet
    marked by prudence or modesty and wise self-restraint
    His mother discreetly continued the conversation in a lower tone but the woman across the aisle said in a loud voice, “Well that’s nice. Selling typewriters is close to writing. He can go right from one to the other.”
  9. objectivity
    judgment based on observable phenomena
    Most miraculous of all, instead of being blinded by love for her as she was for him, he had cut himself emotionally free of her and could see her with complete objectivity.
  10. convey
    serve as a means for expressing something
    There was no way for Julian to convey his sympathy.
  11. reproachful
    expressing disapproval, blame, or disappointment
    His mother kept her eyes fixed reproachfully on his face.
  12. stolid
    having or revealing little emotion or sensibility
    Julian folded his arms and looked stolidly before him, facing her but as if he did not see her, as if he had ceased to recognize her existence.
  13. sonorous
    full and loud and deep
    One morning he had sat down next to a distinguished-looking dark brown man who had answered his questions with a sonorous solemnity but who had turned out to be an undertaker.
  14. solemnity
    a trait of dignified seriousness
    One morning he had sat down next to a distinguished-looking dark brown man who had answered his questions with a sonorous solemnity but who had turned out to be an undertaker.
  15. indignation
    a feeling of righteous anger
    His eyes were narrowed and through the indignation he had generated, he saw his mother across the aisle, purple-faced, shrunken to the dwarf-like proportions of her moral nature, sitting like a mummy beneath the ridiculous banner of her hat.
  16. ponderous
    having great mass and weight and unwieldiness
    He visualized the woman as she had stood waiting for her tokens — the ponderous figure, rising from the red shoes upward over the solid hips, the mammoth bosom, the haughty face, to the green and purple hat.
  17. incipient
    only partly in existence; imperfectly formed
    With a sinking heart, he saw incipient signs of recovery on her face and realized that this was going to strike her suddenly as funny and was going to be no lesson at all.
  18. headlong
    excessively quick
    Then, as if she found nothing familiar about him, she started off with a headlong movement in the wrong direction.
  19. gratuitous
    unnecessary and unwarranted
    "She can wear the same hat as you, and to be sure,” he added gratuitously (because he thought it was funny), “it looked better on her than it did on you. What all this means,” he said, “is that the old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and your graciousness is not worth a damn.”
  20. obsolete
    no longer in use
    "She can wear the same hat as you, and to be sure,” he added gratuitously (because he thought it was funny), “it looked better on her than it did on you. What all this means,” he said, “is that the old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and your graciousness is not worth a damn.”
Created on Fri Jun 04 10:27:09 EDT 2021 (updated Fri Jun 04 10:36:58 EDT 2021)

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