Yesterday in class, you wrote about David Sedaris‘s use of similes, metaphors, and hyperboles. The list that follows illustrates the wide variety of figurative language that you identified in “Me Talk Pretty One Day.”
- David Sedaris employs a simile when he describes himself as “not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage at a fashion show” (167).
- Sedaris fashions a metaphor with the words “everybody into the language pool, sink or swim” (167).
- The essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day” features the metaphorical hyperbole “front teeth the size of tombstones” (Sedaris 168).
- David Sedaris uses a simile when he writes that one classmate’s introduction sounds “like a translation of one of those Playmate of the Month data sheets” (168).
- The author of “Me Talk Pretty One Day” turns to hyperbole when he writes, “The teacher killed some time accusing the Yugoslavian girl of masterminding a program of genocide” (Sedaris 169), and again when he notes that he and his classmates “learned to dodge chalk” (170).
- Similarly, Sedaris uses hyperbole to emphasize his teacher’s reaction, which “led [him] to believe that these mistakes were capital crimes in the country of France” (170).
- David Sedaris fashions a metaphor when he describes his dread, writing, “My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom and accompanied me out onto the wide Boulevard” (171).
- Sedaris’ teacher insults him with a simile when she remarks, “‘Everyday spent with you is like having a cesarean section'” (172).
The bulleted sentences above follow the format that you should follow in your group exercises and other writing assignments that require quotations. These are the specific guidelines to remember:
- The answer should be a minimum of one sentence. It need not be a long sentence, but it should include concrete detail.
- The sentence should not begin with a quotation. Though journalists, fiction writers, and memoirists sometimes begin sentences with quotations, in academic writing, quotations are introduced with signal phrases.
- Do not foreground the paragraph or page number in a sentence. The most important feature of the sentence is the writer’s particular use of words. The page or paragraph number follows in the parenthetical citation.
Dead Metaphors
Some of you identified “killed some time” (169) as a metaphor, but it’s actually a dead metaphor, one so familiar that it’s lost its meaning. Killing time and running for office have become synonymous with the actions they once compared. A dead metaphor is not the same as one that has become a cliché: a predictable or overly familiar expression. Avoid clichés like the plague, which I just failed to do for the sake of illustration. (Avoid . . . like the plague is textbook cliché.)
Memorable Words
One group cited the use of nonsense words, such as “meimslsxp” (167), as an effective way to convey Sedaris’s utter lack of understanding of his French teacher’s speech.
Another noted the fitting choice of “intoxicating” (173) to describe the feeling Sedaris experienced when he finally began to understand French.
Work Cited
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.
“What’s in a Name” Follow-Up
Friday’s blog entry offered a bonus assignment credit to any student who posted a response identifying the classmates whose names are also common nouns, which makes them playable Scrabble words.
The playable names of your classmates appear below in bold, followed by the definitions in parentheses.
- Nick (to make a shallow cut) Beeker
- Aidan Berlin (a type of carriage)
- Jermaine Cain (a tax paid in produce or livestock, also kain)
- Zach Dick (a detective)
- Tommy (a loaf of bread) McHugh
- Davis Smith (a worker in metals)
- Dylan Virga (wisps of precipitation evaporating before reaching ground)
- Sierra (a mountain range) Welch (to fail to pay a debt, also welsh)
Kudos to Nick Beeker, Aidan Berlin, Jermain Cain, Nicole Marin, Sophia Marin, and Sierra Welch for identifying your classmates’ names that are playable words. For their efforts, they will receive a bonus assignment credit in the short assignments and participation category
I will offer additional bonus assignments, so be on the lookout for those. Reading all the notes that I post for you here, on my blog, will ensure that you don’t miss those opportunities.
Congratulations to Aidan Berlin for winning a copy of The Santaland Diaries in yesterday’s raffle.
Next Up
In class tomorrow, you will begin drafting your first major writing assignment longhand. The assignment, a literacy narrative, is an account of a learning experience involving reading, writing, or learning to speak a language. As part of your prewriting process, look back at “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and consider how you might incorporate into your own essay some of the same elements that David Sedaris includes in his. Repeat the process with Helen Keller’s “The Day Language Came into My Life.”
Jane Lucas 