Vocabulary - The Catcher in the Rye Chapters 14 - 17

Part I: Using Prior Knowledge and Contextual Clues

Below are the sentences in which the vocabulary words appear in the text. Read the sentence. Use any clues you can find in the sentence combined with your prior knowledge, and write what you think the underlined words mean in the space provided.

22. . . . I'm sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible.

23. . . . He picked them at random. I said He didn't have time to go around analyzing everybody.

24. He was always saying snotty things about them, my suitcases for instance. He kept saying they were too new and bourgeois.

25. She'd hand in her basket and then go someplace swanky for lunch. That's what I liked about those nuns. You could tell, for one thing, that they never went anywhere swanky for lunch. It made me so damn sad when I thought about it, their never going anywhere swanky for lunch or anything.

26. . . . he was one of the biggest bores I ever met. He had one of those very raspy voices, and he never stopped talking, practically.

27. He was with some gorgeous blonde, and the two of them were trying to be very blase' and all, like as if he didn't even know people were looking at him.


Part II: Determining the Meaning Match the vocabulary words to their dictionary definitions.

_____ 22. atheist A. Smug, conventional, materialistic
_____ 23. random B. Grating
_____ 24. bourgeois C. A person who believes there is no God
_____ 25. swanky D. Having done something so much as to be bored by it
_____ 26. blase' E. Expensive and showy
_____ 27. raspy F. Haphazardly; by chance