rite de passage

[reet duh pah-sazh]

noun

French.

plural

rites de passage 

1. rite of passage.

Example Sentences

Crossing borders has become a formal rite de passage toward identity, and Latin Americans are experts in dealing with the walls, fences and barriers of misreading — as Mexican, Hispanic-American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Caribbean and Latin American, not to mention Latino, mestizo, mulatto, Native and every other wall of misrepresentation.

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To my surprise, however, my next rite de passage, national service, was quite different.

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The title refers to a '50s bawdy house where six Florida youths search for sexual initiation, find humiliation, and then, by revenging themselves on its proprietor, achieve a sort of do-it-yourself rite de passage.

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No doubt the idea was that the whole people were to be purified from all pollution of the past; it is what M. van Gennep calls a rite de séparation, the first step in a rite de passage.

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It will need a long rite de passage before she can freely commune with this world again.

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