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Vocabulary-The Old Man and The Sea
Vocabulary-The Old Man and The Sea
Ernest Hemingway
big blue runner any of various edible jack fishes of warm seas,
as a bluish species and a striped bluish species.
dolphin a game fish with colors that brighten and change when
the fish is taken out of the water.
oakum loose, stringy hemp fiber gotten by taking apart old ropes
and treated with tar, used as a caulking material.
skiff
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he
had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
gaff
It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff
empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled
lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the
mast.
gaunt
The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his
neck.
benevolent
intending or showing kindness
The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its
reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks.
erosion
humility
“Thank you,” the old man said. He was too simple to wonder when he had
attained humility.
stern
The box with the baits was under the stern of the skiff along with the club
that was used to subdue the big fish when they were brought alongside.
subdue
The box with the baits was under the stern of the skiff along with the club
that was used to subdue the big fish when they were brought
alongside.
relic
fiction
a deliberately false or improbable account
There was no cast net and the boy remembered when they had sold it. But
they went through this fiction every day.
bodega
resolution
“I may not be as strong as I think,” the old man said. “But I know many
tricks and I have resolution.”
thole
a holder attached to the gunwale of a boat that holds the oar in place and
acts as a fulcrum for rowing
He fitted the rope lashings of the oars onto the thole pins and, leaning
forward against the thrust of the blades in the water, he began to row
out of the harbour in the dark.
phosphorescence
fathom
ineffectual
producing no result
He watched the flying fish burst out again and again and
the ineffectual movements of the bird.
plankton
As he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the plankton in the
dark water and the strange light the sun made now.
iridescent
But the bird was almost out of sight now and nothing showed on the
surface of the water but some patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso
weed and the purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a
Portuguese man-of-war floating dose beside the boat.
filament
a threadlike structure
From where he swung lightly against his oars he looked down into the
water and saw the tiny fish that were coloured like the
trailing filaments and swam between them and under the small shade
the bubble made as it drifted.
carapace
contempt
He loved green turtles and hawk-bills with their elegance and speed and
their great value and he had a friendly contempt for the huge, stupid
loggerheads, yellow in their armour-plating, strange in their love-
making, and happily eating the Portuguese men-of-war with their eyes
shut.
mysticism
grippe
He also drank a cup of shark liver oil each day from the big drum in the
shack where many of the fishermen kept their gear. It was there for all
fishermen who wanted it. Most fishermen hated the taste. But it was no
worse than getting up at the hours that they rose and it was very good
against all colds and grippes and it was good for the eyes.
myriad
The myriad flecks of the plankton were annulled now by the high sun and
it was only the great deep prisms in the blue water that the old man
saw now with his lines going straight down into the water that was a
mile deep.
annul
cancel officially
The myriad flecks of the plankton were annulled now by the high sun
and it was only the great deeprisms in the blue water that the old man
saw now with his lines going straight down into the water that was a
mile deep.
imperceptible
As it went down, slipping lightly through the old man’s fingers, he still
could feel the great weight, though the pressure of his thumb and finger
were almost imperceptible.
intolerable
rapier
When the old man had gaffed her and clubbed her, holding the rapier bill
with its sandpaper edge and dubbing her across the top of her head
until her colour turned to a colour almost like the backing of mirrors,
and then, with the boy’s aid, hoisted her aboard, the male fish had
stayed by the side of the boat.
longitudinally
He put one knee on the fish and cut strips of dark red
meat longitudinally from the back of the head to the tail.
carcass
improvise
But he seems calm, he thought, and following his plan. But what is his
plan, he thought. And what is mine? Mine I must improvise to his
because of his great size.
sustenance
My hand is only cut a little and the cramp is gone from the other. My legs
are all right. Also now I have gained on him in the question
of sustenance.
interminable
He took all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long gone
pride and he put it against the fish’s agony and the fish came over onto
his side and swam gently on his side, his bill almost touching the
planking of the skiff and started to pass the boat, long, deep, wide,
silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water.
astern
The shark closed fast astern and when he hit the fish the old man saw
his mouth open and his strange eyes and the clicking chop of the teeth
as he drove forward in the meat just above the tail.
malignancy