In this last segment of "The Wordsmiths" series, University of Louisiana Monroe freshman Darius Washington shares how connotative meanings of words vary from person to person due to the experiences that one associates with a word.
What is the most offensive word you can think of? When did you first hear it? Whatever your answers are, I can assure you they are not the same as one six year old girl’s. The word that hurt her and eventually drove her to tears was “tricycle.” One recess, the mocking tone of a classmate was enough to replace the word’s previously innocent definition with a word that sounded insulting. This may seem absurd, but all words are really just empty shells. From tricycle to troglodyte, words all inevitably become filled with our own perceptions and experiences. As we go through life, the words and respective meanings we acquire are as unique as our fingerprints.
A word’s denotation is “the literal or primary meaning of a word.” A word’s connotation is the “idea or feeling which a word invokes for a person in addition to its literal or primary meaning.” All words have denotative and connotative meanings that differ from person to person based on their experiences. However, a word is rarely ever perceived in its denotative form. A prime example of this was explained in an episode of the
Liturgist podcast titled “The Asymptotic Fidelity of Words” Host Michael Gungor tells of how he affectionately called his daughter butthead for most of her childhood. As she grew up, she associated positive feelings with the unusual pet name. She did not learn that the word’s denotative meaning was offensive until she called her friend a butthead and was lectured by surrounding adults. She associated the word butthead with meaning based on her own associations, and ended up viewing a traditionally offensive word as a name to call someone she cared for.
Gungor’s daughter is a prime example of David Wright’s thoughts in his scholarly article “Do words have inherent meaning?”. He says, “No person ever has identical associations with any given language usage.” So, to use an example from the near past, in the 90s words like “bad” and “dope,” which had negative connotations, Now they are used feely without being insulting. While one age group uses a word thinking it has a negative connotation, another age group may think the word is positive, showing that “meaning is equivalent to the hearer’s response.”
So, why is some speech more offensive than other speech? Once again, think of the most offensive word you can and dissect it. We associate words with different experiences we’ve had throughout our lives. Whenever we hear words spoken by another individual, we will never know exactly what the speaker’s intention is, but we can understand enough based on our affiliation with those words. This is the asymptotic infidelity that words have as people will always try to translate their exact meanings for others to understand.
Freshmen at the University of Louisiana Monroe Darius Washington, Tori Laviolette, Andrea Hernandez, Lucy Rauth, and Cole Doucet offer ideas on how connotative meanings of words can form from past experiences.
Students performed research under Vanelis Rivera at ULM, wrote the essays, and chose a narrator.