What are examples of diction in "The Devil and Tom Walker"?

When asked to analyze diction, one is meant to consider the words selected by the writer and how those words impact the experience of the story. For "The Devil and Tom Walker," Washington Irving uses a higher than average diction level, and there are many examples that exhibit his sophisticated vocabulary. One such example from early in the story reads,

It was late in the dusk of evening when Tom Walker reached the old fort, and he paused there awhile to rest himself. Any one but he would have felt unwilling to linger in this lonely, melancholy place, for the common people had a bad opinion of it, from the stories handed down from the times of the Indian wars, when it was asserted that the savages held incantations here and made sacrifices to the Evil Spirit.

In this quote, descriptors like "unwilling to linger" and "melancholy" are much higher diction choices than words such as "not wanting to stay" or "sad." In addition, the nouns in the passage are specific and related to particular worldviews or understandings. They are nearly jargon. These nouns—"savages," "incantations," "Evil Spirit"—are not words a person of minimal understanding would use. They reveal the narrator as educated or experienced with the world of superstition or legend. This sophisticated language makes the narrator seem more reliable or at least more entrenched in the world of the characters than the reader is likely to be.Irving uses such language throughout the piece, and any passage from the text that uses such descriptors or jargon-like nouns would count as an example of diction.

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