Fahrenheit 451
Vocabulary

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Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint.

convolutions = complex folds and twists

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There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!

dictum = formal pronouncement

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The old man admitted to being a retired English professor who had been thrown out upon the world forty years ago when the last liberal arts college shut for lack of students and patronage.

liberal arts = intended to provide general knowledge and intellectual skills

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Aren't there professors like yourself, former writers, historians, linguists ....

linguists = specialists in the study of language

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We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.

loam = rich soil

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Before the bus had run another fifty yards on the highway, its destination would be meaningless, and its point of departure changed from metropolis to junkyard.

metropolis = a large city

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At night when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse area-way, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway, and there would be betting to see which the Hound would seize first.

olfactory = smelling

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He could only pantomime, hoping she would turn his way and see him.

pantomime = communicate through gestures and body movements (without words)

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The old man admitted to being a retired English professor who had been thrown out upon the world forty years ago when the last liberal arts college shut for lack of students and patronage.

patronage = donations of money

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The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves was that we were not important, we mustn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust-jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.

pedants = showoffs of academic knowledge

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Were all firemen picked then for their looks as well as their proclivities?

proclivities = natural inclinations

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Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams.

quibble = argue (about unimportant things)

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My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn't look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn't want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life.

rationalizing = using reason to make excuses for bad behavior

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"Oh, you were scared silly," said Beatty, "for I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point!"

rebut = argue against

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People were more often-he searched for a simile, found one in his work-torches, blazing away until they whiffed out.

simile = a figure of speech that expresses a resemblance between things of different kinds

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Playing the stock-market, of course, the last refuge in the world for the dangerous intellectual out of a job.†

stock = regarding shares of ownership of corporations

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The entire operation was not unlike the digging of a trench in one's yard. The woman on the bed was no more than a hard stratum of marble they had reached.

stratum = layer