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Glass Castle Reading Guide 3 – Pages 102-154As you read these 52 pages, keep a list of four phrases or sentences with vivid descriptive detail. List the page number. (IMAGERY) 2) 3) 4) Consider pages 102 to 105 for the following questions:What kinds of values does Rose Mary try to teach her children? Give examples. (THEME)What kinds of values doe Rex try to teach his children? Give examples. (THEME)How do those values sometimes clash? (CONFLICT)Imagine that Odysseus reads pages 110 to 112 (when Jeannette and Brian go Dumpster-diving, Rose Mary steals a dress, and Rex tricks banks into giving him too much cash). What would he have to say about the Walls family? Be specific. (PERSPECTIVE)Draw a picture of the Walls family Christmas. Include lots of specific details. Color, if you wish! (IMAGERY)What does “find yourself in a family way” (page 114) mean? What is the term for this literary device?What causes Rex to go into a delirium after he promises Jeannette that he will stop drinking? (PLOT)After their trip to the Grand Canyon falls apart and the Walls family is rescued by the woman in large Buick, Rex says that he isn’t hungry and refuses her offer of a Coca-Cola and a sandwich. Why? (CHARACTERIZATION)After the family returns from the trip, Jeannette says, “As soon as she dropped us off, Dad disappeared. I waited on the front steps until bedtime, but he didn’t come home.” (121) Where did Rex go? (INFERENCE)At the point when the family is leaving New Mexico for West Virginia, were you hoping that Rex would get in the car, or that he would refuse to go along? Why? (PERSONAL RESPONSE)Explain what this simile does for the story: “After crossing the Mississippi, we swung north toward Kentucky, then east. Instead of the flat desert edged by craggy mountains, the land rolled and dipped like a sheet when you shook it clean.” (130)What kind of tone does Erma (Rex’s mother) use when she says, “’Nice of you to let me see my grandchildren before I die?’” (130) (TONE)What kind of town is Welch? Give lots of specific details. (SETTING)What kind of irony can be found in the following selection? Explain how it is ironic. “The principal decided that Brian and I were both a bit slow and had speech impediments that made it difficult for others to understand us. He placed us both in special classes for students with learning disabilities.” (136-7) (IRONY)In this section, the author makes the choice to write about her racist relatives, including the offensive, derogatory epithets they use to describe African-Americans. Do you think the author was right to include that language in the book, even though she clearly condemns it as wrong (“’You’re not supposed to use that word,’ I said […]” – page 143) or should she have censored what her relatives said? (ETHICS IN LANGUAGE)List 10 specific, high-impact words that the author uses to describe the house that the family purchases in Welch. (DICTION and IMAGERY)What does Rex mean on page 153 when he says, “‘Helen Keller must have wired this damn house?’” (ALLUSION)Read the attached (edited) article about the evolution of swear words. Explain in one paragraph (five or so sentences) what the main ideas (plural) of the article are. (MAIN IDEA/THESIS)No OffenseProfanity is changing. For the better.By Matthew J.X. Malady (Slate Magazine)Curse words, obscenities, and other taboo utterances—much like the individuals who resort to them in fits of rage—tend to not be known for their stability. They change, fluctuate, shape-shift. Sometimes they disappear on us altogether, never to be heard from again. Or almost never. During an especially dramatic scene in the 2012 box-office smash The Avengers, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, imprisoned and irascible, lashes out at Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), ultimately referring to her as a “mewling quim.” If you recoiled at that moment—or, for that matter, had the faintest idea what was going on—then you should be commended for your solid working knowledge of outdated British profanity. The insult—which would have drawn audible gasps and possible bouts of fainting in mid-19th-century London theaters had Marvel Comics and the requisite movie projection technology been around at that time—amounts to “whimpering vagina.”[…]While there’s nothing new about words becoming more and less taboo with the passage of time, the pace of that process seems to be accelerating—and, even more interestingly, the categories of words that tend to bother people seem to be changing fairly dramatically. In many instances, what’s super-offensive now is quite different from that which was the height of taboo even as recently as 40 or 50 years ago. And that’s because we’ve changed—both in how we share information, and with respect to what most unsettles us.“Curse words tend to based on whatever societies find most taboo, and most scary, and most interesting,” says Melissa Mohr, whose book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing examines how and why people have resorted to profane language, from ancient Roman times to the present. “When they lose power, it’s just those taboos getting weaker, and new ones coming in to replace them.”Early forms of profanity most often involved sexual braggadocio or words intended to disrespect something perceived as sacred—often with religious implications. But gradually the universe of offensive and obscene utterances expanded to include, among other things, gross-out words referencing bodily functions and racial epithets.“There are many ways in which words can be considered taboo or offensive,” says Slate contributor and editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary Jesse Sheidlower. And “such words can fall out of use for various reasons. The entire category can change, so that, for example, words insulting one’s parentage, such as bastard or whoreson, are now relatively mild curses because we no longer place a particularly high value on such things.” Sheidlower adds that bastard and damn were so offensive in the 18th century that “they would frequently be printed b--d or d--m.” But sensitivities change, he says. “Now, they are relatively mild oaths for most English speakers.”[…]But today, modern media seems to be more rapidly eroding the taboo quality of many curse words. Technology aids in the creation and spread of new offensive words, of course, but it also helps facilitate overuse, and thus the potential for a more rapid decline in the taboo levels associated with both new and old words that offend. The amount of profanity on TV has increased dramatically in recent years, but even more influential in this regard is the Internet. According to Mohr, the fact that cursing is so common online is changing the traditional profanity lifespan. “It’s not just that people swear on Urban Dictionary or on YouTube,” she says. “They’ll post videos about it, and talk about it. And I think that has the effect of making it less taboo if everybody’s talking about it.”“The Internet allows people to swear in public more easily than was the case before,” notes Keith Allan, emeritus professor of linguistics at Monash University in Australia and co-author of Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. “Maybe they would’ve had to have been drunk before. But now they can do it in sort of semi-private, because you sit and do it in a room on your own. That might have an effect on reducing taboos.”[…]“Religion, for many people, is not taken as seriously anymore,” notes Allan. “So it doesn’t matter if they blaspheme and use profane language in its old sense. And I think sex is gradually going the same way. […] Pissed is widely used. Shit is used for all sorts of stuff—the shit hits the fan, in the shit, holy shit, and so on. Bodily effluvia is becoming much less taboo. So, you know, what’s left?” What’s left is the one category of taboo utterances that seems to be swimming upstream, actually ascending the offensiveness spectrum.“What you can see becoming more taboo are racial slurs, but then also anything that kind of sums someone up,” says Mohr. “So people objecting to fat. And especially something I’ve noticed just in my lifetime is retarded. People and kids on the playground just said it all the time. And now, it’s really taboo.”McWhorter refers to these as the “sociologically abusive” words. “Not God, not genitals, but minorities,” he says, adding a few others to the list. (You know the ones.) These words and utterances, it seems, are tracing a path that is the opposite of the one currently being traversed by bastard and goddamn and other classics of the cursing genre. “Racist, sexist, fatist terms, those sort of things where you insult the way a person looks, or their ethnic identity, have become far more taboo than they used to be,” Allan says. “People with disabilities generally used to be looked at and laughed at, but that’s not allowed anymore. And it’s becoming more taboo.”That is really f*cking good news.“Not to sound too Pollyannaish, but I think this is a positive development,” says Mohr, “a sign that culturally we are able to put ourselves in other people’s shoes a little bit more than we were in the past, and, at least notionally and linguistically, respect people of all sorts.”The shift in taboos away from sacrilege and gross-out topics toward more personal and, well, flat-out mean epithets appears to be a move in the right direction. The increasingly offensive nature of these words—and the visceral, emotional responses they trigger within us when spoken or heard—just might amount to a signifier of social progress. “There’s got to be something that people take seriously” and see as out of bounds these days, says Allan. “And right now, it’s human frailties.”Adapted from: ................
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