Monday, Sep. 29, 2014

CLASS:

1.  WNB
2.  Review of vocabulary from "Coming into Language".
3.  New Vocab from "Mother Tongue".  Here is the part of the list with the source sentences:
 

1. evoke

call forth (emotions, feelings, and responses)

SOURCE SENTENCE:

I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language--the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.

2.  wrought

shaped to fit by or as if by altering the contours of a pliable mass (as by work or effort)

SOURCE SENTENCE:

--a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.
 

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3.  belie

represent falsely

SOURCE SENTENCE:

You should know that my mother's expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine's books with ease--all kinds of things I can't begin to understand.

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4.  empirical

derived from experiment and observation rather than theory

SOURCE SENTENCE:

And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.

5. guise

an artful or simulated semblance

SOURCE SENTENCE:

When I was fifteen, she used to have me call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her.

6. impeccable

without fault or error

NOTES:

"Impeccable" and "broken" are opposites that would not usually describe the same thing. But Tan's use of the phrase "impeccable broken English" 1) mocks the ideas of "impeccable English" and "impeccable manners"--both of which Mrs. Tan is not displaying in the example sentence's situation; 2) contrasts with Tan's adolescent and unconvincing perfect English; 3) gives more respect to her mother's language.
SOURCE SENTENCE:

And sure enough, the following week there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.

 
HOMEWORK:  

Find two synonyms and 2 antonyms for each word and record them in your vocabulary notebook.