Skip to main content

What disturbing things do the women in Montag's parlor say to each other?

In "The Sieve and the Sand", Montag's wife, Mildred, invites some of her friends over to watch parlor programs. Montag, growing increasingly skeptical of society, decides to shut off the parlor and attempt to draw some conversation out of the women. Their responses infuriate him, despite Faber attempting to calm him over the ear-radio they share, and Montag calls them "monsters talking about monsters", taking particular issue with "the way" they talk about things.


The three subjects the women talk about are the war, their children, and politics. None of the women seem to have any regard for the danger of the war, attempting to keep up a cheerful attitude that it will be over in two days, with no casualties of any personal importance to them. One is repulsed at the thought of children, but the other says she had two by cesarean section (despite being fully capable of giving birth, but not wanting to be inconvenienced) and that now she puts her children in school most of the time, and when they're at home she puts them in the parlor. Finally, the women reveal that their primary considerations in the previous presidential election were the personal appearances of the candidates, treating it more as a beauty contest and wondering why a short, fat man would ever be considered a match for a tall one. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...

Is 'efficate' a word in English?

I routinely hear the word "efficate" being used. For example, "The most powerful way to efficate a change in the system is to participate." I do not find entries for this word in common English dictionaries, but I do not have an unabridged dictionary. I have checked the OED (I'm not sure if it is considered unabridged), and it has no entry for "efficate". It does have an entry for "efficiate", which is used in the same way. Wordnik has an entry for "efficate" with over 1800 hits, thus providing some evidence for the frequency of use. I personally like the word and find the meaning very clear and obvious when others use it. If it's not currently an "officially documented" word, perhaps its continued use will result in it being better documented.