Answer the following questions.

1. Alliteration is used frequently in this essay. Could you pick out some examples of alliteration from the essay and make comments on them?

Answer: “lean” and “leather” are placed together for alliteration. Both “lean” and “leather” begin with the sound “l”. This rhetorical device is called alliteration, which is the repetition of an initial sound, usually of a consonant in two or more words of a phrase, a line of poetry, etc. There are many examples of alliteration in this essay:

More examples of alliteration.

• “jest” and “gesture”

• “fright” and “false” alarm

• “fringed” and “flowered” shawls

2. What does the frequent use of alliteration reveal about the author’s attitude toward language?

Answer: The frequent use of alliteration shows the author’s special interest in the sound of language, the rhythm of language, how words sound to him and the reader.

3. Can we replace the word funeral (funeral silence) with dead (dead silence) in the first sentence of Paragraph 14? Explain why and why not?

Answer: No. The word “funeral” cannot be replaced with the word “dead”. Dead silence means complete silence. But funeral silence means the kind of silence that characterizes a funeral. Here the author uses it together with the word “wake”, which means watching over or viewing a corpse before burial and the word “mourning” in the following sentence.