All 4 Uses of
prodigal
in
Atlas Shrugged
- The metal came rising to the top of the ladle and went running over with arrogant prodigality.†
Chpt 1.2 *
- The homes were not lined along a street, they were spread at irregular intervals over the rises and hollows of the ground, they were small and simple, built of local materials, mostly of granite and pine, with a prodigal ingenuity of thought and a tight economy of physical effort.†
Chpt 3.1
- Second, you're the only woman left in the outer world, to the best of our knowledge, who'd be allowed to enter Galt's Gulch, Third, you're the only woman who'd have the courage-and prodigality-still to remain a scab.†
Chpt 3.2
- She was thinking of the years when the works he had just played for her were being written, here, in his small cottage on a ledge of the valley, when all this prodigal magnificence of sound was being shaped by him as a flowing monument to a concept which equates the sense of life with the sense of beauty-while she had walked through the streets of New York in a hopeless quest for some form of enjoyment, with the screeches of a modern symphony running after her, as if spit by the infected throat of a loud-speaker coughing its malicious hatred of existence.†
Chpt 3.2
Definitions:
-
(1)
(prodigal) recklessly wasteful
or more rarely:
abundant (extravagant in amount)
or more rarely still:
long absent (someone who has been away a long time) -
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
More rarely, prodigal is used as a noun as a shortened version of prodigal son to reference someone who is wasteful like the prodigal son in the famous Christian parable. When the prodigal son came home and apologized for his wasteful and ungrateful ways, his father forgave him, loved him, and celebrated the return.