Meaning of "She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing" [closed]

Solution 1:

It’s a partially inverted sentence, with the prepositional phrase for a ringing phone moved further up in the sentence for emphasis. In a more neutral word order, it would be:

She was a girl who dropped exactly nothing for a ringing phone.

The deeper meaning of ‘dropping’ something is that when the phone rings, you are (or perhaps rather: you used to be) expected to drop (= stop) everything you were doing and rush over to pick up the phone.

This girl who drops nothing to do so, basically just observes that the phone is ringing, but doesn’t let it distract her from what she is doing. Maybe she just let it ring until it finished; maybe she waited until it suited her and then went to pick up the phone—that’s not clear. But she certainly didn’t drop what was in her hands to go pick it up immediately.

Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean she physically had anything in her hands. The phrase is most commonly drop everything, which must originally have referred to just letting go of whatever you had in your hands, but now has the much broader, more generic meaning of stopping whatever you’re currently doing, whether it involves you having something in your hands or not.

Solution 2:

Almost all the time a single sentence is, if not insufficient, undesireable when asked to answer 'what does this sentence mean?' Besides that, you left out the second sentence of this quotable.

As others have gleaned, the girl is not willing to drop anything, that is, interrupt anything she is doing in order to answer the phone. To drop everything is an idiom meaning to stop what one is doing to attend to something else. Here Salinger alludes to the idiom by using an opposite term--'exactly nothing'. The bolded part is a two-sentence paragraph. Both sentences are usually quoted together. Here the girl lets the phone ring until she has finished painting and air drying her left pinky and has otherwise readied herself for the call.

THERE WERE ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. She used the time, though. She read an article in a women's pocket-size magazine, called "Sex Is Fun-or Hell." She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.

She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.

With her little lacquer brush, while the phone was ringing, she went over the nail of her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon. She then replaced the cap on the bottle of lacquer and, standing up, passed her left--the wet--hand back and forth through the air. With her dry hand, she picked up a congested ashtray from the window seat and carried it with her over to the night table, on which the phone stood. She sat down on one of the made-up twin beds and--it was the fifth or sixth ring--picked up the phone.

"A Perfect Day for Bananafish"
– J. D. Salinger
The New Yorker, January 31, 1948

Solution 3:

Here ringing phone denotes urgency of a situation with the feeling of "pick it up or you lose" so it means that the girl didn't lose her calm even when in a situation that required her to make a quick choice leaning towards yes than no.