GLOSSARY

ANTHRAX - An infectious, often fatal disease of sheep and cattle that can also kill humans. The Utopian state was established after a war in which anthrax bombs were used as a weapon of germ warfare.

BOKANOVSKIFY; BOKANOVSKY'S PROCESS - Method to make a human egg bud by arresting its growth, producing up to 96 identical people.

CASTE - One of the five groups into which all citizens of the brave new world are divided by heredity and conditioning, each with its own rank and intelligence range. They are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon, from the Greek letters that English schools use as grades.

COMMUNITY SING - An observance of the Fordian religion for the lower castes. The Arch Community Songster is the equivalent of an Archbishop.

CONDITION - To put into a desired state by chemical, physical, or psychological action.

DECANTING - Process by which embryos are removed from the bottles in which they grow; equivalent of birth.

ECTOGENESIS - Reproduction outside the human body, for example in bottles.

EMOTIONAL ENGINEERING - Designing propaganda for use on citizens. The Utopia's closest equivalent to writing poetry.

FITCHEW - A Shakespearean word that John uses to curse Lenina. Literally a polecat, but in Shakespeare's day it also meant a prostitute.

FLIVVER - An old, small, or cheap automobile. Henry Ford's original Model T was often called a flivver, so the word takes on religious meaning in the Utopia.

FREEMARTIN - A sterile person; the Utopia makes 70 percent of its females freemartins by dosing the embryos with male sex hormones. They still have female sex organs, but they also have beards that need shaving.

GAMETES - General term for reproductive cells of either sex.

HYPNOPAEDIA - Teaching people while they sleep. In the book, suitable only for moral suggestion, not facts or analysis.

OVA - Female reproductive cells.

PODSNAP'S TECHNIQUE - Method to speed the ripening of human eggs, making it possible to multiply the number a single ovary can produce.

PREDESTINATION - The process of determining which embryos will grow up to do particular jobs in particular places. The word has religious overtones; it once meant God's decision as to who would be saved and who would be damned.

PREGNANCY SUBSTITUTE - A medical technique that floods a woman's body with all the hormonal and other physical changes it would undergo during pregnancy, which she will never experience.

SAVAGE - A person who is born and raised outside the Utopia and does not know how to behave according to its rules. Savages live on Reservations surrounded by electrified fences. The Savages who appear in the book resemble Indians of the Southwest United States.

SCENT ORGAN - An instrument that plays smells the way a piano or a pipe organ plays music.

SOLIDARITY SERVICE - A Fordian religious observance for the upper castes, usually 12 people who eventually unite in a sexual orgy.

SOMA - A drug that both tranquilizes and intoxicates without hangovers or side effects. It provides citizens of the Utopia with escape from self and surroundings. The word comes from the Sanskrit language of ancient India. It means both an intoxicating drink used in the old Vedic religious rituals there and the plant from whose juice the drink was made-a plant whose true identity we don't know.

SPERMATOZOA - Male reproductive cells.

SURROGATE - Something selected as a substitute. Embryos grow in blood surrogate instead of real blood because they grow outside a mother's body. Morocco-surrogate is imitation leather. Violent Passion Surrogate floods the body with the same hormones that fear and rage would.

VIVIPAROUS - Bearing live young rather than eggs, as mammals, including humans, do.

ZIPPICAMIKNICKS - Women's underwear, one-piece but sexy.

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