Language In Ian Frazier's Take The F

In Ian Frazier’s “Take the F,” Frazier gives an observation of his views on Brooklyn, the F train and New York City as a whole. Within these observations, Frazier writes beyond a given place and considers the interaction of people. For example, he describes his long train ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan: “every ride can produce its own mini-society of riders, its own forty-minute Ship of Fools.” By using “mini-societies” Frazier gives readers the sense that these riders aren’t strangers anymore, they are a body of “people living together in a more or less ordered community.” Through his scrutiny, Frazier connects strangers through common sensory experience showing that people form connections beyond verbal language and are instantly linked through the power of senses. Without language, …show more content…
This created a limitation. In doing a task, verbal language served as a barrier for the students in communicating. Rethinking the status quo, one where language is a restriction rather than something that can link people together. Granted, verbal language connects people, but exclusively within a small range of those who can understand it, the students were from all different places, one language wouldn’t suffice. By contrast, sensory experience is rather universal to all who have one or more senses, making it simpler for people to communicate. Frazier also includes that other students sang songs like “God Bless America.” One may believe that this is an example of language, but it is rather a sense of sound. In hearing music and song, one can replicate and share it, a unification through music is shown and learned through a sensory experience. “Fourth and fifth graders” are like this “mini-society” as Frazier explained earlier, as they are a whole in this auditorium, singing one song. The American students sing American anthems which contributes to integrating them into a larger society, the