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Shmoop, there it is...

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Hm... wonder what that pause button does... maybe you should hit it and see what happens...

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The term "picayune" is BEST understood as... what?

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And here are the potential answers...

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Vocab time, boys and girls. Of course, we don't just want to look this puppy up on dictionary.com...

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...instead, we need to take a look at how it's used here in the passage and make a judgment

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call based on context.

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Ugh... dictionary.com would be so much easier...

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Okay, so the word is used on line 29:

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"I don't ask you to think of your family or friends, because I know they don't count a

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picayune with you beside your sense of duty..."

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If we replace our vocab word with each of the answer choices, which one makes the most sense?

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Well, first off we can pretty much eliminate A, B and D because... they all mean the same thing, more or less.

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And they all mean roughly the opposite of what we're looking for... we want something

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that translates to: "I know you couldn't care less about your family"...

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...so we certainly don't want words that make it sound as if Burne cares strongly, greatly,

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or a large amount about them.

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Plugging in E -- an insufficient amount -- sorta fits... but it creates a double negative situation

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and doesn't quite make sense grammatically.

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So we're looking for answer C -- a small amount.

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And we get a sentence that roughly says, "I know your family only matters to you a small

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amount, except when it comes to duty."

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Hopefully there will be only a small amount of duty.

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We're running out of plastic bags.

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