All 16 Uses of
plumb
in
The Poisonwood Bible
Uses with a meaning too common or too rare to warrant foucs:
- "Plumb tuckered out," she would say.†
Chpt 1
- I just plumb let go, and the earth reeled beneath me.†
Chpt 1
- Father explained to us that he had gone plumb crazy, consorting with the inhabitants of the land.†
Chpt 1
- Still, the Underdowns insisted that our mission last no more than one year—not enough time for going plumb crazy but only partway, I guess, even if things went poorly.†
Chpt 1
- Mama Mwanza almost got burnt plumb to death when it happened but then she got better.†
Chpt 1
- We see village women constantly sweeping their huts and the barren clearings in front of their homes with palm-frond brooms, and Rachel with her usual shrewdness points out you could sweep a floor like that plumb to China and never get it clean.†
Chpt 1
- My father let the parrot go because we accidentally taught it to say bad words, but it didn't go plumb away.†
Chpt 2 *
- Father was going to keel plumb over.†
Chpt 2
- We'd seen him babbling and walking cockeyed down the road, leaning over so far you keep thinking he'll plumb fall over.†
Chpt 2
- He says his mother was so excited about showing off the baby to the upstream relatives he got jealous and hid out, and she plumb forgot to take him.†
Chpt 2
- Everybody that ever sees our owl just plumb hates it.†
Chpt 2
- At the mention of palm nuts she whined, "But, you all, on a diet of just fruit we could plumb die or even get diarrhea."†
Chpt 3
- To the Congolese (including Anatole himself, he confessed) it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the other gets forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second one plumb loses.†
Chpt 3
- Leah always had the uppermost respect for Father, but after the hullabaloo in church where they voted Father out, she just plumb stopped being polite.†
Chpt 4
- I felt my red skin was going to scald plumb off, and then I'd look just like that poor antelope.†
Chpt 4
- The babies all got diarrhea and plumb dried up.†
Chpt 6
Definitions:
-
(1)
(plumb as in: it is plumb) exactly vertical or straight
-
(2)
(meaning too common or rare to warrant focus) meaning too common or too rare to warrant focus:
More commonly, plumb is used an intensifier meaning "completely," as when someone expresses that they are tired by saying, "I'm plumb wiped out." More rarely, plumb can also be used as a verb to refer to doing plumbing. It can also refer to the weight at the end of a line that is used to see if something is straight.