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Varunee Ekpongsakorn
2202235 Reading and
Analysis for the Study of English Literature
Acharn Puckpan
Tipayamontri
January 25, 2011
Reading Response #3
The
Meaning of Meimslsxp
In
class we discussed how meimslsxp and occurrences like it
in David Sedaris’s “Me Talk Pretty One Day” are a jumble
of letters but not meaningless. They convey not only difficulty,
mystery and humor, but also frustration, challenge and despair.
From the shock of the first unknown French word, meimslsxp
(167), I followed the odd-looking strings throughout the short
story and found that despite their unpronounceability, they
ironically do not signify unsayability because the
teacher rolls them out easily enough. Instead, it would seem
that unpronounceability stands for inability, not to pronounce,
but to understand. David the narrator himself tells us that he
“understood only half of what this woman was saying” (167).
The
jumbled form stands for jumbled understanding and, as Acharn
Puckpan suggested Monday, bring the diverse and divided students
(ex. “some accents were better than others” 167) together.
Where before David feels intimidated by his confident and
“young, attractive, and well dressed” classmates, after a
few weeks of palicmkrexis and fiuscrzsa ticiwelmun
(170), there is “no sense of competition” left, if there
ever was any, amongst the students as they “huddle” under
the ego-breaking blows of these frequent reminders of their
“pathetic French” (172). Yet, this is not quite true, or
rather, this is not all of what meimslsxp and its fellows
mean.
The series that begins with meimslsxp
and continue on to lgpdmurct, apzkiubjxow, vkkdyo
and kdeynfulh may look baffling, but they mean the
opposite (167, 172). “Much work and someday you talk
pretty,” says one student to another (172). These terrible and
unwieldy blobs actually mean the plainest and most fluent
utterances—the perfect French that the teacher speaks so
easily. Despite its shape, meimslsxp defines not the
broken “Sometime me cry alone at night” that the students
manage, but words fluid and articulate—that is, pretty. |