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Copywork
About This Passage
Peggy Parish stages a small linguistic philosophy lesson in three sentences. Amelia faithfully obeys the literal meaning of an English idiom and produces a result the speaker never intended. The chapter rests on the gap between dictionary meaning and use-meaning.
Amelia Bedelia got some scissors. She snipped a little here and a little there, and she changed those towels.
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Give a concise summary, then identify the most important moment.
Discussion Questions
- Amelia is the perfect literal speaker. Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations argues that meaning is determined by use, not by definition. Is Peggy Parish writing a small Wittgensteinian fable?
- The Rogers do not fire Amelia. Instead, Mrs. Rogers learns to speak Amelia's way ('undust the furniture'). What is being claimed about who does the work in cross-language friendships?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Wittgenstein's claim that words mean what they actually do in practice
Item 2
a phrase whose meaning is not the sum of its individual words
Item 3
using language in a non-literal way
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Critical Thinking
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