The House on Mango Street Vocabulary Unit 4

1. Precocious adj. Displaying or characterized by unusually early development or maturity, especially in intelligence Blind children, it has often been noted, tend to be precocious verbally, and may develop such fluency in the verbal description of faces and places as to leave others (and perhaps themselves) uncertain as to whether they are actually blind. - Oliver Sacks, “The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See, ” The New Yorker, July 28, 2003

2. Propriety n. Conforming to prevailing customs and usages

3. Revel v. To take great pleasure or delight in something After the Color Run the entire team reveled in their accomplishment and celebrated with a picture.

4. Scintillating adj. Lively and exceptionally intelligent; animated and brilliant

5. Stigma n. An association of disgrace or public disapproval with a characteristic, condition, or behavior Despite the fact that major depression ranks second only to heart disease in the nation’s “disease burden” (a measure that takes both mortality and morbidity into account), and despite the great scientific leaps that psychiatry has made, the report found the stigma associated with mental illness to be overwhelming: many people do not even accept that mental function is the work of a physical organ – a basic tenet of psychiatry. - Daniel Smith, “Shock and Disbelief, ” The Atlantic Monthly, February 2001

6. Stoic adj. Seemingly indifferent to pleasure and pain; showing little or no emotion There are two ways of coping with fear: one is to diminish the external danger, and the other is to cultivate Stoic endurance. - Bertrand Russell, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1950

7. Suave adj. Gracious and sophisticated Chessy: Look, you and I both know your father’s not some kind of suave, debonair bachelor-of-the-month type, so I got to ask myself what does a young hot thing like that see in a guy who walks around with his shirttail hanging out and his cereal bowl full of chili. Then I realized, there’s about a million reasons why that girl’s giggling, and all of them are sitting at the Napa Valley Community Bank. - from the film The Parent Trap, 1998

8. Unrequited adj. Not given, rewarded, or felt in return Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. ” - President Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865 Commonly used to refer to Unrequited Love

9. Vicarious adj. Experienced or felt by empathy with or imaginary participation in the life of another person

10. Vile adj. 1. Loathsome and disgusting. 2. Morally depraved or wicked. When I tasted it I knew why. It had been another of Pinky’s cost-cutting measures, her replacing the local honey with the Chinese honey that came in five-gallon pails and was poured into squirt bottles. This stuff was vile, with the dusty oversweet industrial taste of the Chinese corn syrup hat had been used to adulterate it. - Paul Theroux, Hotel Honalulu, 2001