Untitled Flashcards Set

1. Chronicler (n): a person who writes accounts of important historical events; historian; reporter

“In the 1820s, Edwin James, the official chronicler of Major Stephen Long’s survey, declared the region ‘a dreary plain, wholly unfit for cultivation,” and, of course, “uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for subsistence.’”

2. Confluence (n): junction; merging; a coming or flowing together

“This is the Heartland, the place where Jefferson’s idea of a rectangular cadastral survey, the land grid system outlined in the Land Ordinance of 1785, found its most perfect confluence of longitude, latitude, and countryside so well behaved that it laid itself down in neat, even squares for the surveyor’s instruments.”

3. Descent (n): an action of moving downward, dropping, or falling

 “Being blond, fresh-faced, and midwestern makes their descent into ruthless behavior in places like Los Angeles and New York all the more tragic.” 

4. Etymology (n): the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history.

“My grandparents wouldn’t have known the etymology of the word [heureka], but they would have felt it, the anticipation, as they waited along with the other immigrants from Russia to receive their allotments of land.”

5. Foiled (v): to prevent (often something considered wrong or undesirable) from succeeding; to counter, oppose, impede

“Soon enough, as the surveying expedition moved west, the neatness of the grid was foiled by steep valleys, rivers, foothills, and mountains, but here in the monotonous square states, the survey subdivided the land easily into square upon square, each measuring six miles by six miles.”

6. Indignity (n): treatment or circumstances that cause one to feel shame or to lose one's dignity; embarrassment

“It was Edwin James who dubbed the area between the Mississippi and the Rockies the Great American Desert, an indignity from which the region has struggled to recover ever since.”

7. Macabre (adj): disturbing and horrifying because of involvement with/depiction of death and injury; gruesome, morbid.

“This is a region that contains both Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon (“where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average”) and the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, the macabre land of murder-by-woodchipper.”

8. Monotonous (adj): dull, tedious, and repetitive; lacking in variety and interest.

“Soon enough, as the surveying expedition moved west, the neatness of the grid was foiled by steep valleys, rivers, foothills, and mountains, but here in the monotonous square states, the survey subdivided the land easily into square upon square, each measuring six miles by six miles.”

9. Spawn(v) to create offspring; comes from the noun referring to the eggs of fish, frogs, etc; 

 “This is the way I recently heard a comedian describe the column of states that holds down the center of the country—the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma —a region that spawns both tornadoes and Republicans.”