Claremont COURIER/Friday, January 27, 2017

COLOR ME!

uthor Mark Twain is known for his gift with

dialects. A dialect is a regional way of speaking. For instance, in our part of the country,
we usually ask for a soda or, maybe, for our favorite
soft drink by name: Ill have a Coke. In much of the
rest of the country, soda is referred to as pop.

Two of his most famous stories, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, are placed in the madeup town of St. Petersburg on the banks of the Mississippi River, a
setting inspired by Twains boyhood town of Hannibal, Missouri.
Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, skillfully
weaves between the more proper language of Tom and the exuberant
slang of his friend Huckleberry Finnwhos been running wild and
living on his ownand the dialect of the local African American
people who in that time and in that place were kept as slaves. (Many
see The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as one of the most powerful books showing that slavery is wrong.)
Heres a bit of the book from when 12-year-old Tom, forced to
paint a fence as a chore by his Aunt Polly, gets his friends to actually
PAY himwith apples and a bunch of boyhood treasuresto do the
whitewashing for him. He is certainly a clever boy, which you can
hear in his manipulative and dialect-heavy words.
NonoI reckon it wouldn't hardly do, Ben. You see, Aunt
Polly's awful particular about this fenceright here on the street,
you knowbut if it was the back fence I wouldn't mind and she
wouldn't. Yes, she's awful particular about this fence; it's got to be
done very careful; I reckon there ain't one boy in a thousand, maybe
two thousand, that can do it the way it's got to be done.

ng by writing.
You can make anythi

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C.S. Lewis

cles of Narnia
author of Chroni

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