Kumar’s Reviews > Gullivers Travels > Status Update

"The women of the island have abundance of vivacity"
Vivacity - the quality of being attractively lively and animated (V)

Why didn't Gulliver's ship attempt to avoid being boarded by pirates? Why wasn't there a struggle for the pirates to board? (A)

Swift uses his vocabulary to strike fear/anxiety into the reader's head by describing the scene, "When I came to my own house, for which I was forced to inquire, one of the servants opening the door, I bent down to go in..."

He was perfectly astonished with the historical account
gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting ‘it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.’" The number of adjectives that Swift uses (F)

"But one day, I took a thick cudgel, and threw it..."
Cudgel - a short thick stick used as a weapon.

'Supplicating' - ask or beg for something earnestly or humbly.
"All I ventured was to raise mine eyes towards the sun, and place my hands together in a supplicating posture" (V)

I really like the creativity that Swift uses in this sentence, "This lord, in conjunction with Flimnap the high-treasurer, whose enmity against you is notorious on account of his lady, Limtoc the general, Lalcon the chamberlain, and Balmuff the grand justiciary, have prepared articles of impeachment against you, for treason and other capital crimes.’" (W)

I really like how Swift is comparing the lives of the Lilliputians indirectly with the lives of actual humans while expressing how corrupt society can be (F)

Again, Swift uses satire to expose traditions that seem really unnecessary, "The learned among them confess
the absurdity of this doctrine; but the practice still
continues, in compliance to the vulgar." (W)

By this point in the book, Jonathan Swift is using satire without hesitating, and he's also writing really well rhetorically, "...where it was opposed
by none, except Skyresh Bolgolam, who was pleased,
without any provocation, to be my mortal enemy." (W)