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The Road Part 3: Words 8884 Views
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Description:
Always read The Road with a dictionary at hand, because you’re going to need it. Seriously. We’re not known to be perfidious (though we do have somewhat of a sesquipedalian flair), so why would we give you erroneous information?
Transcript
- 00:01
We speak student!
- 00:05
[ scream ]
- 00:06
The Road
- 00:07
Words
- 00:08
a la Shmoop
Full Transcript
- 00:10
[ bird caws ]
- 00:11
So what's going on with McCarthy's writing style?
- 00:16
You cannot get through The Road without a dictionary in hand.
- 00:18
I couldn't, at least.
- 00:19
This guy writes with SAT words in his pocket.
- 00:24
And beyond SAT words. Beyond GRE words.
- 00:27
These are words that are archaic-sounding.
- 00:30
Things that you would just never hear
- 00:33
or read in any normal book.
- 00:35
If you really wanna understand every word,
- 00:37
you actually do have to get through a --
- 00:40
- He's gonna... - Awesome. And I'm picking up the book here, people.
- 00:43
And I'm looking for some five-dollar words here. Oh, my goodness.
- 00:46
We've got diseases here.
- 00:48
Flowstone - F-L-O-W-S-T-O-N-E.
- 00:52
Granitic. Rimstone.
- 00:54
And glaucoma we know. That's that eye disease.
- 00:57
My goodness. Okay, yeah, you definitely need
- 01:00
the dictionary. And you wanna read this on a Kindle
- 01:03
- or something. - Yes, exactly.
- 01:04
You can double-click and get the...
- 01:05
And we're just gonna keep going.
- 01:06
There's a lot of five-dollar words.
- 01:07
So you read an academic paper
- 01:09
and you see all these five-dollar words
- 01:10
and you know the person's just trying to sound smart.
- 01:12
Cormac McCarthy is not gonna sell
- 01:14
a book that way. The reason that he's
- 01:16
writing like this, we can imagine, is to kind of
- 01:19
juxtapose or highlight
- 01:21
the totally mundane world
- 01:24
that's all around this man and the boy.
- 01:26
They are literally just trying to survive.
- 01:28
The man and his son are walking down the road.
- 01:31
They can do nothing but survive.
- 01:33
And having all these big, biblical words happening
- 01:38
highlights how banal and mundane everything around them is happening.
- 01:44
They have to scrounge for food.
- 01:47
And they have to pee outside.
- 01:49
And they get super sick.
- 01:50
The man is coughing up blood, et cetera, et cetera.
- 01:54
And we're getting it described with these insanely
- 01:56
flowery words, and it really just
- 01:58
highlights how depressing and
- 02:01
nothing everything is around them.
- 02:03
Wow. Okay. Sounds like animated Disney musical material for me.
- 02:08
[ pen writing ]
- 02:09
Why does McCarthy use so many five-dollar words?
- 02:13
What is life like for the characters in the novel?
- 02:18
Are you trying to show off or something?
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