Ivana Mitevski
Mr. Clark
AP Lang
17 August, 2016
Top Five Vocabulary words
1.Callous
1a. “If a hospital wants to sell - or even give away- women’s aborted fetuses to make them into pills, they owe it to those women to ask for their consent. To do otherwise is callous and disrespectful” (Roach,236)
1b. Definition: emotionally hardened (the free dictionary by farlex)
1c. Using the word “callous” Roach is embedding her own opinion and bias. In giving her opinion to the readers they can, in return, change how they feel on this topic, and that can be accomplished by using the word “callous”, as it has an emotional appeal to the reader.
1d. Stealing the cows was a callous act, now the farmer won't be able to sell good milk.
2. Gaunt
2a. “The object of their attention at the moment is a seventy-five-year-old man… He looks gaunt and desiccated” (Roach,75)
2b. Definition: Thin or emaciated. (the free dictionary by farlex)
2c. When people die, their bodies will decompose. In the paragraph here, Roach is explaining to the reader and enhancing the image of the cadavers body to make it clear that they know that the cadaver is very thin. Later in the reading roach tells us that the body is going through an embalming.
2d. She stood there, naked, a gaunt figure in her thinness, ready for the students to paint her.
3. Placid
3a. “ clemons pressed a button. The half-horse rises. The sight is a disquieting blend of horse as-we-know-it - placid, dejected horse face.” (Roach, 255)
3b. Definition: undisturbed by order, calm and peaceful. (the free dictionary by farlex)
3c. The choice of this word in relation to the text gives the reader an understatement. The creature was once cared for by humans. Upon death, the horse’s face looked calm, but also detached. Roach put those words together on purpose, because she wants the reader to feel attached to the horse and to feel it was alive once and that maybe it enjoyed its life.
3d. There was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm Blasts soothed the flowers born without seed.
4. Cloying
4a. “It is difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing human. It is dense and cloying, sweet but not flower-sweet.” (Roach, 70)
4b. Definition: causing distaste/ disgust through excess (the free dictionary by farlex)
4c. The use of this term, along the other terms that surround it applies to both physical and emotional senses of the reader. On one side the cadaver is just a pile of rotting flesh, but on the other side the cadaver was once a living human being. That's why Roach used terms such as “halfway of rotting fruit and rotting meat”
4d. Anyway, the article just seems overblown, even cloying to me.
5. Dexterity
5a. “In those days, the task required great patience and dexterity, and very thin thread” (Roach, 207)
5b. Definition: still and grace in movement. (the free dictionary by farlex)
5c. The main purpose of this word is to give the reader an idea of common mistakes surgeons could make. A long time ago, surgeons had to be very careful with their work because they didn’t have the complex technology that doctors have today
5d. Her dexterity is not notable either in comparison with the normal person, whose movements are guided by the eye, or, I am told, with other blind people.
I.Top Five Passages
1.“They are donated cadavers, helping, in their mute, fragrant way, to advance the science of criminal forensic. For the more you know about how dead bodies decay- the biological and chemical phases they go through, how long each phase lasts, how long the environmental effects these phases- the better equipped you are to figure out when any given body died: in other words, the day and even the approximate time of day it was murdered.”