Batting Clean

Batting Clean-Up and Striking Out

In Dave Berry’s Batting Clean-Up and Striking Out, first published 1988 in Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits, the author justifies that while men are oblivious to dirt females are even more oblivious to sports. In Berry’s essay, he points out how women are very tidy and seem to be capable of seeing dirty that the male eye cannot see. According to Berry’s women see premature dirt on the horizon of forming while men just see a clean bathroom. A woman cannot stand filth and must always tidy up because something that might look perfectly clean to a man looks absolutely filthy to a woman. While women are very perceptive about dirt, men are very aware of sports. Berry states that as sensitive as women are to dirt, men are to sports. Berry claims that a man’s sense are hyper aware when it comes to sports. While every sense of them is tingling with the sport a women is completely oblivious and unaware that a game or any other sport relate phenomenon is occurring. The clear difference between a man and a woman is that while a woman is more aware of dirt than a man, the man is more aware of sports than the woman is.

Tone

Sarcastic, Mocking

Discourse

Compare and Contrast, Example

Rhetorical Terms

* Metaphor- “…Joe’s Sportsman’s Lounge, where the men’s room had bacteria you could enter in a rodeo.”(p3)

* Parentheses- “They never even noticed the ash until it had for the most part covered the chicken “Hey!” the men said (in Latin).”(p2)

* Simile- “…they could crush my skull like a ripe grape, but I feel these women are the exception.” (p5)

* Hyperbole-“…enables them to see dirt that men cannot see, dirt at the level of molecules, whereas men don’t generally notice…”(p2)

* Repetition- “… the murder can hear the victim’s heart beating louder and louder even though he (the murder victim is dead…”(p7)

Questions

* Meaning#2- How objective is Barry’s portrayal of men and women? : Berry’s portrayal is very objective because...