All 3 Uses of
tantalize
in
Catch-22
- He could picture, as he walked, the kind of underclothing they wore against their svelte feminine parts, filmy, smooth, clinging garments of deepest black or of opalescent pastel radiance with flowering lace borders fragrant with the tantalizing fumes of pampered flesh and scented bath salts rising in a germinating cloud from their blue-white breasts.†
Chpt 16 *
- Officers' clubs everywhere pulsated with blurred but knowing accounts of lavish, hushed-up drinking and sex orgies there and of secret, intimate nights of ecstasy with the most beautiful, the most tantalizing, the most readily aroused and most easily satisfied Italian courtesans, film actresses, models and countesses.†
Chpt 21
- The pimp spun the turban high on his finger like a trophy and kept himself skipping inches ahead of her finger tips as he led her in a tantalizing circle around the square congested with people who were howling with laughter and pointing to Yossarian with derision when Milo strode up with a grim look of haste and puckered his lips reprovingly at the unseemly spectacle of so much vice and frivolity.†
Chpt 22
Definition:
-
(tantalize) to make someone excited about getting something -- often something they cannot geteditor's notes: The word, tantalize, comes from a Greek mythological story about the eternal punishment of someone named Tantulus. He was made to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree. But when he reached up for the fruit, it withdrew just out of his reach. And when he bent down to drink, the water receded before his lips could reach it.