Brave New World Vocabulary

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effusive "The D.H.C. had at that moment sat down on one of the steel and rubber benches conveniently scattered through the gardens; but at the sight of the stranger, he sprang to his feet and darted forward, his hand outstretched, smiling with all his teeth, effusive."

extravagantly demonstrative

ruminate "He put away the soma bottle, and taking out a packet of sex-hormone chewing-gum, stuffed a plug into his cheek and walked slowly away towards the hangars, ruminating."

to chew the cud

burgeon "Two, four, eight, the buds in their turn budded; and having budded were dosed almost to death with alcohol; consequently burgeonedagain and having budded—bud out of bud out of bud—were thereafter—further arrest being generally fatal—left to develop in peace."

to grow and flourish

renounce ""Work, play—at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen. Old men in the bad old days used to renounce, retire, take to religion, spend their time reading, thinking—thinking!""

turn away from; give up

suppression "Accompanied by a campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments (luckily most of them had already been destroyed during the Nine Years' War); by the suppression of all books published before A.F. 150."

withholding or withdrawing some writing from circulation

callow "A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director's heels."

young and inexperienced

aperture "A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous aperturespierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught."

a usually small man-made opening

ingenuous ""But why do you want to keep the embryo below par?" asked an ingenuous student."

lacking in sophistication or worldliness

maudlin ""I always think," the Director was continuing in the same rather maudlin tone, when he was interrupted by a loud boo-hooing."

effusively or insincerely emotional

predestined "They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miners and acetate silk spinners and steel workers."

established or arranged in advance unalterably

axiomatic "The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable."

evident without proof or argument

incandescence "The molten stone poured out in a stream of dazzling incandescence across the road; the asbestos rollers came and went; at the tail of an insulated watering cart the steam rose in white clouds.'

light emission by a body as its temperature is raised

soliloquize "Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizinghum or whistle, of absorbed concentration."

talk to oneself

inculcate "But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behavior."

teach and impress by frequent repetitions or admonitions

centrifugal "Described the artificial maternal circulation installed in every bottle at Metre 112; showed them the reservoir of blood-surrogate, the centrifugal pump that kept the liquid moving over the placenta and drove it through the synthetic lung and waste product filter."

tending to move away from the middle

mutation "He became rather technical; spoke of the abnormal endocrine coordination which made men grow so slowly; postulated a germinal mutation to account for it."

any event that changes genetic structure

rudimentary "In a little grassy bay between tall clumps of Mediterranean heather, two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing, very gravely and with all the focused attention of scientists intent on a labor of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game."

being in the earliest stage of development

caustic "On Rack 10 rows of next generation's chemical workers were being trained in the toleration of lead, caustic soda, tar, chlorine."

capable of destroying or eating away by chemical action

corporeal "For Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons had been to some extent conditioned to associate corporeal mass with social superiority."

characteristic of the body as opposed to the mind or spirit

immoral "For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed."

deliberately violating principles of right and wrong

inscrutable "Our Ford—or Our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters—Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life."

difficult to understand

incongruous "Fanny's kind, rather moon-like face took on an incongruous expression of pained and disapproving astonishment."

lacking in harmony or compatibility or appropriateness

spasmodic "There was something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic yelps to which they now gave utterance."

occurring in spells and often abruptly

posthumous "Thousands of petals, ripe-blown and silkily smooth, like the cheeks of innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that bright light, not exclusively pink and Aryan, but also luminously Chinese, also Mexican, also apoplectic with too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale as death, pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble."

occurring or coming into existence after a person's death

simian "The liftman was a small simian creature, dressed in the black tunic of an Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron."

relating to or resembling an ape

asceticism "Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism."

rigorous self-denial and active self-restraint

primal "Stability," insisted the Controller, "stability. The primal and the ultimate need. Stability. Hence all this."

serving as an essential component

mockery "The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects."

showing your contempt by derision

caste "Every two and a half minutes a bell and the screech of whistles announced the departure of one of the light monorail trains which carried the lower caste golfers back from their separate course to the metropolis."

social status conferred by a system based on class

enumerate "Hinted at the gravity of the so-called "trauma of decanting," and enumerated the precautions taken to minimize, by a suitable training of the bottled embryo, that dangerous shock."

specify individually


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