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STEP 1: Write definitions. TYPE IN BLUE.
Ambiguity ___________________________________________________
Subtleties ____________________________________________________
Contradictions _________________________________________________
Ironies _______________________________________________________
Incongruities __________________________________________________
Ambiguities, Subtleties, Contradictions, Ironies, and Incongruities
STEP 2: Analyze the videos, the pictures, and the text below to interpret the meanings
beyond the obvious.
VIDEO PART 1: Watch the following video.
1) Based on what you saw in the video, write a prediction of what you think the movie is about.
POLAR BEAR AD
2) What is this advertisement using to create the message (ambiguity, subtlety, contradiction, irony,
or incongruity) & explain why it falls under that category?
RUBIKS CUBE AD
3) What is the message that the advertisement is communicating?
4) How long do you think this guy was trying to solve the Rubiks Cube and what are some of the
subtleties in the image that suggest a length of time?
5) The slogan says, "25 Years and Still Going." When the slogan is put together with this image, what
message or idea does the company communicate through the subtleties?
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Read the passage below and answer the questions. The Tell-Tale Heart
6) How would you describe the narrator from this passage?
7) Provide some evidence of ambiguity, subtlety, contradiction, irony, or incongruity that supports
your description of the narrator and explain why your evidence supports your description?
VIDEO PART 2: Watch this video
8) What is the movie about now? What changed?
9) Now that you have a better idea of what the movie is about, go back to VIDEO PART 1 and watch
it again. What are some of the ambiguities, subtleties, contradictions, ironies, or incongruities that
provide evidence as to what happens in the story and explain what proof it gives?
Ambiguity
Subtleties
Example from the video
Explanation:
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Contradiction
Irony
Incongruity
10) The contrast between what a character says and what is really meant is a type of —
A.
B.
C.
D.
ambiguity
contradiction
irony
subtlety
11) Which of the following items best describes contradictions and incongruities in a text?
A.
B.
C.
D.
Moments when the character knows something the reader does not know
Examples drawn from classical literature or mythology
Times in a story when things don´t come together as they should
Elements in a text that help organize information
Jeans by Any Other Name/The Domino Effect
Jeans by Any Other Name
In 1854 Jacob Youpes immigrated to the United States from Latvia. He changed his name to Jacob Davis
and opened a tailor shop in New York, where he manufactured high-quality clothing. In 1856 he decided to
move to San Francisco. Monetary opportunities failed to be what he had anticipated, however, and in 1858,
when word arrived that gold had been discovered in the Fraser River in western Canada, Davis joined
thousands of other hopefuls and made the trek north. He stayed in Canada, married, and started a family. He
began selling equipment and supplies to miners, but again he was unsuccessful.
After moving his family to Reno, Nevada, in 1868, Davis invested his money in a brewery, but the
investment soured, and he lost still more money. Looking at the big picture, he came face to face with the
disturbing fact that his list of business failures was extensive. To support his family, he had to come up with a
better plan. Davis knew he had been a successful tailor in New York. He decided to again pursue that line of
work.
In 1869 he opened another shop and began to manufacture tents, horse blankets, wagon covers, and other
utilitarian items. Davis knew he had to fabricate merchandise that would hold up for prolonged periods and
would tolerate heavy use. In order to produce this type of merchandise, he used a heavy material called duck
cloth–from the Dutch word doek, meaning “linen canvas”–that he ordered from the Levi Strauss Company, a
wholesale establishment in San Francisco.
One day a customer wanted to place a special order. The woman wanted Davis to sew an inexpensive pair
of pants for her very large husband. In addition to paying the $3 charge, she left strict instructions that the
pants should be sturdy so that they would not come apart like other pants her husband had owned. This
fortuitous order would shape not only Davis’ clothing design, but the future of pop fashion.
Davis used the heavy duck cloth to make the pants. As he worked, he thought about how to reinforce the
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garment. He noticed the little box of copper rivets he had been using to make the horse blankets, wagon
covers, and tents. In a flash of genius, Davis attached rivets to the pants in places subject to extra strain, such
as pockets and points where certain seams came together. This simple act revolutionized the clothing
industry and changed his future.
The woman reported that her husband was very pleased with the riveted pants, leading Davis to think that
the pants might just work as well for other men. After eighteen months, Davis had sold two hundred pairs of
riveted duck-cloth pants. By 1871 he was making the pants even stronger by constructing them from denim,
a sturdy, twill-type fabric originally called serge de Nîmes. Denim was first manufactured in Nîmes, France, in
the seventeenth century, and the name denim is simply an Americanization of the French name.
Davis continued to successfully market his riveted denim work pants. Could his luck be changing? He
knew that he should file for a patent before someone copied his idea. Davis’ wife, Annie, urged him not to
squander money on a patent. However, he was intent on following his intuition, and he was going to ask for
help.
It seemed logical to Davis to ask his primary supplier, Levi Strauss, for assistance. In 1872 he sent two
pairs of the pants and a letter to Strauss:
. . . the secratt of them Pants is the Rivits that I put in those Pockots and I found the demand so large that I
cannot make them fast enough. I charge for the Duck $3.00 and the Blue $2.50 pear. My nabors are getting
yealouse of these success and unless I secure it by Patent Papers it will soon become to be a general thing
everybody will make them up and thare will be no money in it. . . . I wish to make you a Proposition that you
should take out the Latters Patent in my name as I am the Inventor of it, . . . the investment for you is but a
trifle compaired with the improvement in all Coarse Clothing. I remain yours truly, Jacob Davis.
Strauss understood the request despite the poor spelling. He agreed to pay the $68 fee for the patent and
offered Davis employment as head tailor and production manager of his company. Davis accepted and moved
his family to San Francisco in 1873, the same year the patent was approved. One year later, 21,600 pants and
coats, all made with riveted pockets and seams, were being worn by miners, cowboys, lumberjacks, and
other workers throughout the West.
In the 1930s the copper rivets on the back pockets of the pants were removed to avoid scratching saddles,
seats, and cars. By 1950 zippers replaced buttons on the fly of the jeans, as the pants had been called for
years. The word came from the sturdy cotton trousers worn by Italian sailors from Genoa, who were
called Genes by the French.
Davis held the position of production manager at the Levi Strauss Company until his death in 1908. If
Davis had paid the $68 fee for the patent application instead of partnering with Levi Strauss that day in 1872,
jeans might not have become the popular icons they are today.
Bibliography
Bordeaux, Paul. “The Legend of Denim.” Retro Thrift Nov. 2003: 46–58.
Tanaka, Lloyd. Rivets and Seams. Toronto: Cassidy, 2005.
Weiss, Lydia. The San Francisco Style. Berkeley: Telegraph, 1996.
The Domino Effect
On a Saturday, the din at Riverwoods Mall is deafening–a raucous mess of kids shouting, adults shouting at
kids, the pings and pops of gaming and record stores, and the hollow echo that reverberates in such a
cavernous space teeming with consumption. I zeroed in on my destination, eager to escape the surrounding
discord. As the doors of the clothing store closed behind me, the droning noises subsided.
“Hey, Nick.”
It was Rex Jansen, whom I’d known since childhood. He lived a few blocks away; we both played a lot of
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sports growing up, and for a couple of years in grade school we hung around with the same group of friends.
He was two years ahead of me in school, but in some ways he was miles ahead of most of the neighborhood
kids. You could tell that Rex was going somewhere in life; he just had an air about him that big things were in
store for him. Rex was something of a leader, and not just for our neighborhood, but also for the whole
school, and even for the whole town.
“Hey, Rex.” I noticed the nametag–Rex, Sales Associate. “I didn’t know you worked here.” I was a little
surprised to see Rex working at the mall. He was the type of guy who already had an office job while only in
high school, the guy making speeches at our high school assemblies, the best pitcher on the varsity baseball
team (when he was only a freshman), the wide receiver who could catch any football thrown within ten
yards of him, and the volunteer who was always showing up in our hometown newspaper for some event he
planned as a student representative of the local 4-H Club. Rex wasn’t perfect, but he comported himself with
such grace and genuine goodwill that I couldn’t help but admire him.
“Yeah, I needed to get a summer job, and this is where most of my clothes come from anyway,” he said.
“How’s your summer going? Keeping in shape?”
I’m a runner–an exceptionally fast runner. I play soccer and run track, but when school starts in the fall,
I’m going to be playing running back for our varsity football team. I’ll be on the same team as Rex.
“Trying to,” I shrugged. If by “trying” I meant waking up at six each morning even though it was summer
vacation, biking over to the school soccer field, and getting in a five-mile jog each day, yeah, I was trying.
“I think it’s fantastic that you’re going to be on the team,” said Rex. “And as a sophomore. That’s really
great. You were always the fastest kid in the neighborhood. I told Coach you were amazingly fast even before
you tried out.”
“Great, thanks! Do you sell jeans?” I said, before mentally wincing. What a dopey thing to say, especially
considering Rex was standing directly in front of wall shelving with literally hundreds of pairs of blue jeans
on display.
“Huh? Oh, yeah–we’ve got plenty to choose from,” he said, gesturing to the wall of denim behind him.
“What size? What color?”
“I see them,” I mumbled, edging past him so I could reach for a pair of jeans off the top of a neatly aligned
stack.
“Hey, Nick,” Rex said in a hushed tone.
I glanced over at him, trying to act as casual as possible.
“Yeah?”
“Those are women’s. Men’s are all on this side,” he smiled.
“Thanks. Those probably won’t work for me,” I said, placing that pair back as smoothly as I could, given
the circumstances. I’m not what you’d call an uninhibited talker, but around most people, even people I meet
for the first time, I can usually hold my own in a conversation. But Rex intimidated me a little bit, not because
of anything he said or the way he acted toward me–I mean, I’ve known him for most of my life–but more
because he seemed to be such a rising star in our town. It was like a story my dad tells about how he met
Michael Jordan in a grocery store when Jordan was in college, before he started winning all those basketball
championships and MVP awards. He shook Jordan’s hand and asked him for an autograph for his son. I still
have that grocery receipt in my room. But my dad said he could tell that the young basketball player was
going to be one of the greats. There was just something charismatic about him.
I grabbed a few different styles of jeans and headed to the changing rooms. I plopped down on the tiny
bench, still feeling embarrassed about the whole women’s jeans thing. At least Rex hadn’t given me a hard
time about it. Although he probably couldn’t, since he was on the job. Still, nobody would ever picture him
pulling a goofy move like that.
Stop that, I told myself. It was just a mistake. And Rex is cool; he’s going to be my teammate. Like my dad
always says, he puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like everybody else.
The dressing room wasn’t the largest I’d been in, which I discovered when I bumped my head while
reaching down to untie my sneakers. “Ow!” OK, that didn’t work. So I lifted my left foot up to try again.
Stretching my leg out in that tiny, cramped room, I slammed it onto the top of the little bench, which acted
as a sort of mini-trampoline, forcing me backward against the door–which wasn’t entirely closed. The door
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flew open, and I burst out of the changing room, sprawling right into a display rack, sending hangers and golf
shirts tumbling to the floor. The rack, of course, hit the display rack behind it, and that one hit the next rack,
creating a clanging domino effect of entangled hangers, caught price tags, and disheveled clothing. To make
matters worse, the displays had been arranged in a circular pattern, like the blocks at Stonehenge, and falling
racks of denim destruction toppled, one after another, circling inexorably toward the rear of the store,
making their way past the children’s section, then the women’s section, until the last rack crashed into an
imposing mannequin decked out in the latest styles and now slowly tipping downward directly toward Rex
and me.
We sprang in opposite directions, and I felt the rushing air caused by the mannequin’s fall whip past me as
I dodged. The resulting clatter of its impact seemed all the louder because of the quiet that followed. The
mannequin, looking not so stylish now because of the physical impossibility of its posture, not to mention its
unfortunate decapitation, lay at my feet.
On the other side of the room, a last pair of khakis fell from the shelf.
“Are you OK, Nick?”
It was Rex, standing above me and offering a hand up.
I sprung to my feet as quickly as I could, my face reddening as I felt the eyes of the whole store on me.
“I’m fine.” I brushed some nonexistent dust off myself. “I just hope I can make the same kind of impact on
our opponents this fall.” I don’t know where those words came from; they just flowed out of me. Rex cracked
up. “And hopefully the Belmont Barkin’ Bulldogs are easier to dodge than these impressive-looking shirt
racks.”
“I heard that,” laughed Rex. “You’re going to have to teach me that little spinning roll you pulled there.”
I grinned, feeling a little less awkward about having publicly trashed a store in front of the most popular
guy in school.
Rex looked neither angry nor embarrassed, but rather very amused.
“Let me help you clean this up. It’s the least I can do.”
I spent the next forty-five minutes helping him return the half of the store I demolished to its original
customer-friendly state. We chatted the entire time, catching up on people we knew from school and talking
about our upcoming fall season. He may have been Rex Jansen, super student, all-around athlete, and wellrounded person, but I know him as my friend.
12) Interpret how the author restates the theme in the last paragraph of “Jeans by Any Other Name.”
A.
B.
C.
D.
The author hints at the irony of the successful partnership.
The author suggests that jeans are undeserving of their popularity.
The author illustrates the contrast between jeans in 1872 and jeans today.
The author highlights the ambiguous relationship between Davis and Strauss.
Which of these BEST demonstrates the irony of “the domino effect” in the passage?
A. The accident makes Nick laugh rather than cry.
B. The accident produces friendship rather than anger.
Answer Key
1) C
2) C
3) A
4) B