1. Chavez's intent with the first six words is to show the reader that she realizes that civility is vital in speeches, although it should not hold you back from your word choice or using literary devices to get your point across.
2. Bellicose has the meaning of demonstrating aggression and willingness to fight. Chavez uses bellicose in her column because many political terms also relate to war terms. Chavez gives examples such as the word "campaign," which in French means open land, which in English refers to the time spent on the battlefield. Also, when campaigning, people constantly bring up the term "rounds" for the time that a political leader campaigns, and Chavez relates this to rounds that refer to ammunition.
3. A) Chavez is attempting to persuade her audience that, although civility is important, changing our words to make them civilized can very easily take the emotion and the strength of the delivery of the speech away.
B) In my opinion, the best example that supports her point is the following sentences: "A well-meaning but foolish effort to replace the disgusting term [the "N" word] with "slave" in order to get the book past school censors deprives students from learning important lessons about both racism and the social mores of earlier eras. Diction in great literature tells us something about character, in both senses of the word, and tampering with it distorts the author's intent and interferes with the reader's understanding."
4. I agree with Chavez's point that sometimes you may need to go against civility to get your point across in a more effective way. Like Chavez stated in the previous quote, getting rid of certain words or replacing them with less derogatory terms can, and most of the time does, take away the deeper meaning of speeches and writings. Also, word choice can provide a greater education about the past, or even just expand our vocabulary. For example, Chavez uses “Huckleberry Fin” to show that replacing the “N” word with slave takes away the meaning and gives a much more bland picture of what was going on at the time. Yes, civility is important in public addresses, but it should not hold us back from using intelligent, deeper meaning words. We should be courteous with our words, but also flexible.
