The old gentleman owned a lot of farms and over a hundred niggers. Sometimes a stack of people would come there, horseback, from ten or fifteen miles around, and stay five or six days, and have such junketings round about and on the river, and dances and picnics in the woods day times, balls at the house nights. These people was mostly kinfolks of the family. The men brought their guns with them. It was a handsome lot of quality I tell you.
There was another clan of aristocracy around there- five or six families- mostly of the name of Shepherdson. They was a high-toned and well born and rich and grand as the tribe of Grangerfords. The Sheperdsons and Grangerfords use the same steamboat landing, which was about two mile above our house; so sometimes when I went up there with a lot of are folks I used to see a lot of the Sheperdsons there on their fine horses” (108). In the novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain uses word choice to describe the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons. These families are seen as high and powerful amongst the rest of the common people. In the novel, Mark Twain, uses diction to illustrate Hucks admiration of the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons as well as to further challenge his ideas about slavery. In this passage, Twain used diction to describe two families, the Grangerfords and Shepherdons. Mark Twain wrote that these families are “ high-toned”, “well born”, “rich”, and “grand” in order to describe the