instructor's blistering assaults continue when she calls upon a Yugoslavian student, who terms herself an optimist because "she loved everything that life had to offer."

The teacher licked her lips, revealing a hint of the saucebox we would later come to know. She crouched low for her attack, placed her hands on the young woman's desk, and leaned close, saying, "Oh yeah? And do you love your little war?"

The attacks continue: the instructor decries her students for disliking soap, laziness, and paintbrushes, even accusing the optimistic Yugoslavian girl of orchestrating genocide.

The students naively believe this first-day cage rattling will cease once the "deadweight" falls away. It doesn't.

Sedaris's response to the instructor's constant belittling is to spend inordinate amounts of time on his homework assignments in an attempt to turn the instructor's assessment of him as "lazy" to "David the hard worker." Of course, when she tells him in pitch-perfect English, "I really, really hate you," it would seem all his efforts are for naught.

The instructor's brutality does not make her students rise to the occasion but rather demeans and demoralizes them, stripping them of confidence in their linguistic skills—and, indeed, in themselves. Sedaris describes his fellow students as "huddled in the hallways and making the most of our pathetic French ... engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps." They hope to "talk pretty" one day.

It is only after an entire term of unrelenting insults that Sedaris has the revelation that he perfectly understands French. He comes to find the scorn soothing and glorious in a way—because though he can't necessarily speak as fluently as he may wish, he can finally decipher what the language of love means.

The point of the essay is that the process of learning a new language turns even full-grown people into children. Sedaris recounts in hilarious fashion how he attends a class to learn French in Paris and feels very much like a scared kindergartener. His teacher begins to teach the class the names of the French letters, and Sedaris realizes that he does not even know the alphabet in French. When he answers the first question he is asked in class—what he loves—he is abused by his teacher for forgetting the gender of the word "typewriter" in French and is made to feel idiotic.

Thus begins many weeks of tribulations during which he must labor over simple homework and be physically and verbally abused by his teacher. The reader suspects that Sedaris is exaggerating his teacher's abuse for funny effect, but the point remains that he feels insecure until he can finally completely understand his teacher's insults. The larger point of the essay is that learning brings out people's insecurities and makes them again feel like scared little children, as the process causes them to feel weak and vulnerable.

Me Talk Pretty One Day is a collection of non-fiction essays by David Sedaris that covers various events in his life. The book is divided into two sections; the first section is made up of thirteen essays that cover a range of topics, from making fun of overly-prepared elaborate foods (“Today’s Special”), describing the deaths of his childhood pets (“The Youth In Asia”), and his foray into the new world of the internet (“Nutcracker.com”), while the second section centers around experiences based of a move to France.

A standard English Composition class teaches that there are a possibility of five basic “goals” or “aims” that a writer might take into account while crafting a piece: to inform (such a journalist giving us the facts), interpret (when you might talk about or interpret something for the reader), persuade, entertain, and express (such as a love letter expressing feelings).

There is often more that one aim at work. Typically, there is a primary, or main, aim, and secondary, or underlying, aim. In Me Talk Pretty One Day, one could make the argument that Sedaris’s primary “goal” is to express his feelings on whatever topic or situation he is talking about. One could also say that his secondary aim is to entertain. He is a humorist and a satirist, after all.