Acentral idea of "nameless, tennessee" is that the town seems to be without a name, but with its colorful inhabitants and their histories it's not really nameless. which quotation from the story shows how the central idea emerges
a) "chronologically, the names had piled up: wives, grandparents, a stillborn infant, relatives, friends close and distant. names, names. after each, the date of the unknown finally known and transcribed"
b) "forget the durn post office,' he said. 'this here's a nameless place if i ever seen one, so leave it be.' and that's just what they did."
c) "some wanted patriotic names, some names from nature, one man recommended in all seriousness his own name. they couldn't agree, and they ran out of names to argue about."
d) "you think nameless is a funny name,' miss ginny said. 'i see it plain in your eyes. well you take yourself up north a piece to difficult or defeated or shake rag. now them are silly names."

[1] nothing that comes from the desert expresses its extremes better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the sierras and coastwise hills. the yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age like an old [5] man's tangled gray beard, tipped with panicles of foul, greenish blooms. after its death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes even the moonlight fearful. but it isn't always this way. before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a luxurious, creamy, cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap. the indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast the prize for their [10] own delectation why does the author use the words "bayonet-pointed" (line 4) and "fence of daggers" (line 9) to describe the leaves of the yucca tree? . to create an image of the sharp edges of the plant to emphasize how beautiful the plant's leaves are to explain when and where the plant grows to show how afraid the author is of the plant