Below is a list of new words I stumbled upon today in Catch-22. These words play an important role in the sentences that I came across, so I have to look them up to understand what’s going on. The definition I provided is copied and pasted from Merriam-Webster dictionary.
JAUNDICE (n.): yellowish pigmentation of the skin, tissues, and body fluids caused by the deposition of bile pigments
Ex. Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.
# I don’t want to add picture for this word. Look it up!
MONOTONOUS (adj.):
1) uttered or sounded in one unvarying tone: marked by a sameness of pitch and intensity
Ex. Suddenly there was the monotonous old drone of bombers returning from a mission, and the firemen had to roll up their hoses and speed back to the field in case one of the planes crashed and caught fire. (The sound of the bombers were at the same pitch and intensity)
2) tediously uniform or unvarying
Ex. All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers.
OBLITERATE (v.): to remove from existence : destroy utterly all trace, indication, or significance of
Ex. When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters, he began attacking the names and addresses on the envelopes, obliterating whole homes and streets, annihilating entire metropolises with careless flicks of his wrist as thought he were God.
EXPURGATE (v.): to cleanse of something morally harmful, offensive, or erroneous; to remove from
Ex. Yossarian was busy expurgating all but romance words from the letters when the chaplain sat down in a chair between the beds and asked him how he was feeling.
ECSTASY (adj.): a state of overwhelming emotion
Ex. (with ecstatic from catch-22) “You’re a chaplain,” he exclaimed ecstatically. “I didn’t know you were a chaplain.”
