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Read “By Any Other Name,” by Santha Rama Rau.
Identify diction that gives evidence of a developing conflict between the girls and the headmistress in the first scene.
Answer:
Diction refers to the selection of certain words or phrases. In the first scene, the headmistress assigns new names to the girls, instead of their real Indian ones, simply because she finds Indian names difficult to pronounce.
The conflict can be perceived in both the dialogue and the narrator´s choice of words.
Step-by-step explanation:
For example:
The author pejoratively says of the headmistress: "she still smiled her helpless inability to cope with Indian names".
The headmistress implies Indian names are not pretty when she says "Suppose we give you pretty English names." Then the narrator shows her sour attitude when describing her actions: "She shrugged in a baffed way at my sister." Of her sister, she explains how upset she was by saying "she kept a stubborn silence."