Diction Style in the Short Story Entitled Furnished Room

4.1.1.2 Diction

O. Henry frequently uses multifarious diction, start from the familiar diction until far fetched ones. I provide a list of far fetched diction found in the short story, so that readers can find what O. Henry emphasizes in his short stories. Paragraph 1 Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. Sentence 1 1 Fugacious adj. poeticliterary tending to disappear; fleeting. Derivatives : fugaciously adv. fugaciousness n. fugacity n. ORIGIN C17 : from L. fugax, fugac- from fugere ‘flee’ + -ious. Paragraph 2 Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant guests. Sentence 5 2 Vagrant n. 1. a person without a home or job. archaic a wanderer. 2 Ornithology a bird that has strayed from its usual range or migratory route. adj. of, relating to, or living like a vagrant; wandering. poeticliterary unpredictable or inconstant. Derivatives :vagrancy n. vagrantly adv. Origin ME : from Anglo-Norman Fr. vagarant ‘wandering about’, from vagrer Paragraph 4 It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below. sentence 22 3 imp n. a mischievous child. a small, mischievous devil or sprite. v. repair a damaged feather in the wing of a trained hawk by attaching part of a new feather. Origin :OE in ME denoting a descendant of the devil or an evil person: impa, impe ‘young shoot, scion’, from impian ‘to graft’, based on Gk emphuein ‘to implant’. Paragraph 7 He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime. Sentence 52 4 ooze n. wet mud or slime, especially that found at the bottom of a river, lake, or sea. Derivatives :oozy adj. Origin : OE ; rel. to ON veisa ‘stagnant pool’, influenced by ooze. Paragraph 10 The furniture was chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Sentence 66 5 grotesque adj.1 comically or repulsively ugly or distorted. 2 shockingly incongruous or inappropriate. n.1 a grotesque figure or image. 2 a style of decorative painting or sculpture consisting of the interweaving of human and animal forms with flowers and foliage. 3 Printing a family of 19th-century sans serif typefaces. Derivatives :grotesquely adv. grotesqueness n. Origin :C16 as n.: from Fr. crotesque, from Ital. grottesca, from opera or pittura grottesca ‘work or painting resembling that found in a grotto’. Paragraph 12 Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the strong, sweet odour of mignonette. Sentence 75 6 mignonette n. a plant with spikes of small fragrant greenish flowers. [Reseda lutea and related species.] Origin :C18: from Fr. mignonnette, dimin. of mignon ‘small and sweet’. From the list above, we can see that O. Henry uses various diction in writing a short story and that way he reveals his writing style. He chooses words in detail although the words have old origin. Actually, I also figure out another O. Henry’s characteristic: the frequent used of Non-standard English to illustrate the characterization of characters. This fact is shown in the conversation between Mrs. Purdy and Mrs. Cool in paragraph 20 and 21. For example: the paragraph contains a non standard English word and uses apostrophe in words such as “do ye” , “ma’am”, “rentin’”, “Tis right ye are, ma’am”, “kape”, “rayjict”, “dyin’” , “Yis”, “wake”, killin’”, “ swate”. Usually the uneducated people use it because it is created beyond the Standard English.

4.1.1.3 Figure of speech