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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

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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