Thanksgiving is a dumb holiday, or so it could seem from Joshua Keating’s article “If It Happened There… America’s Annual Festival Pilgrimage Begins”. Celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November, this North American holiday is one that many traditions have developed around. Written in November of 2013 on Slate.com, Keating uses satire, quantitative evidence, loaded diction, and tone in this article to seemingly express some of his own opinion while allowing the audience to view Thanksgiving from a different perspective. Many Americans look forward to Thanksgiving Day for various reasons. As the article suggested, some of these may include family, football and food while others are the shopping, the memories, and the laughs shared. The original meaning and reason for the creation of this holiday was simply so that there would be a day set aside for people to reflect and give thanks for all that has happened. It has, however, evolved in to so much more.…show more content… In the article, Keating uses words that fall under this category almost too many times to count. Examples of these include “questionable historical facts”, “slaughtered”, “brutal”, and “macabre” (Keating 1). These are specifically put in place because they have negative connotations associated with them and the author wants this to be prevalent in the reader’s mind. His purpose is to draw attention to these and display how bad some of the traditions are. Not to say that Keating completely dislikes Thanksgiving, but it is clear that Keating uses so many of these loaded diction words just to forth all the possible negative things about the holiday. Also, since the article is written as if were happening in another country, these types of words are used because it is easier to think negatively about something happening in a foreign land than it is to think about these things in your own