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Eighner's 'Dumpster Diving'

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In the first five paragraphs of Eighner’s “On Dumpster Diving”, Eighner writes about how he loved dumpsters, and that he became obsessed with the word, “...I was impressed with Dumpsters, enough so that I wrote the Merriam-Webster research service to discover what I could about the word ‘Dumpster’”(Eighner 1), which he uses to show his authority on the subject of dumpsters, an appeal to ethos. As a formerly homeless man, Eighner has a great deal of experience with dumpster diving, as the essay explains. From here, he writes about his experience as a “dumpster diver”, though he prefers the term, “scavenger”. He says that there are many words used to describe what he does, such as “scrounging”, and “foraging”, each of which having their uses:

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