A Symbol of Our Culture

A Symbol of American Culture Jennifer Price wrote the essay, “The Plastic Pink Flamingo” with intentions to get her opinions clearly across. Price paid close attention to her word choice and successfully used diction to portray her tone towards how she feels about American culture. Repetition is a useful form of diction to get the writer’s point across. Price used this by constantly repeating the word “pink.” When reading something over and over again, one tends to get bored with the idea. Price intended for the reader to get bored and sick of reading the word “pink” because it reflects how America’s history has a lot of repetition in it. Price expressed her irritation for how America started a new trend, using flamingos, and used this trend over and over again until it lost meaning. The symbol of the flamingo was used repetitively until it lost its importance, and essentially got boring. This fact in itself clearly bothered Price. From the start, Price’s attitude expressed how she felt about the use of the flamingo. The title, “The Plastic Pink Flamingo,” could be taken in a couple different ways. Plastic is describing the pink flamingo, yet plastic has two meanings. It could mean plastic as in the material the flamingo is made out of, but I think Price was intending to use plastic as a play on words and have plastic mean fake or superficial. This definition would represent Price’s attitude of how she thinks America is so superficial and devalues objects, such as the flamingo. Price also used a simile to create a great visual of what she thought American culture was like. She compared our culture to, “[being] like a line of semiotic sprouts.” She draws attention to this simile by using alliterations of “like a line,” and “semiotic sprouts.” It is not exactly a compliment to be compared to a plant, not to mention how boring and uninteresting it is. This phrase paints a picture in our heads of sprouts just sitting there droning on and on. When comparing this