Something occurred to me today during a car ride home with my parents. Their conversation made me realize just how ambiguous language can be. A bunch of their statements could have been applied to pretty much everything else. Why was a certain word chosen to fit in this certain context? I know we have already decided that there comes a point when the study of semantics is conducted too extensively, but one word sparked my attention: "corruption". Do you all realize how often this word is used? It can describe the government (flashback to AP U.S. History), people, businesses, you name it! So I am taking the liberty to draw a conclusion. The more often a word is put into use, the more trite it becomes, and it is used in a wider variety of contexts. I know this is probably an obvious point to come up with, but from this point I went further. Do we even know what words like "corruption" actually mean? We know it has something to do with unlawful means, but we have come to use it loosely.
Does this expansion of contexts mean that we are losing the essential meaning of the word? I'm interested.
(Sam Maliha)
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8 comments:
I don't think that using a word over and over again necessarily makes it trite. I think that it just expands the ways in which that word can be used. Also, I don't think that the essential meaning of the word is lost, seeing as their is a different definition of the word for every person. Of course, the meaning may alter drastically from its original meaning, but isn't that the case of mainly all the words that we use?
It is surely one of the cases. Yet I still feel that the continual use of a word allows us the liberty to expand its meaning. People who write the dictionary eventually notice this, because they add new defitionions with each successive edition. It still makes me wonder what the single, essential meaning of the word was when it was first coined or first came into existence.
(Sam Maliha)
I wouldn't say that using a certain word more and more causes it to lose its "essential" meaning. After all, who are we to judge the "essential" meaning of a word in the first place? As time progresses, words often gain new meanings, new twists of previous meanings. I remember that we discussed the word "war" in class a few months ago, and we talked about how the word "war" has grown to encompass a wide variety of connotations.
Of course language can be ambiguous, but the power of contexts usually points to which meaning is being used. When it fails, well, that's why language isn't perfect.
This is why taking note of the context is such an important part of interpreting things. It is natural for a word to gain additional meanings, whether it is through overuse or misuse, and thus expand its reach and become less specialized. Nevertheless, like Eric, I would hesitate to say that one can definitively state that "we are losing the essential meaning of the word." The expansion of a word's meanings is part of language's ability to adapt. If words were unable to gain new uses in different contexts, how could language ever evolve?
Well, I wouldn't describe language as being linear, but it has to have some starting point, right? What would we call this initial form of the word? After reading your views, I now hesitate to call it the "essential" meaning of the word, but I'm still curious as to its roots.
(Sam Maliha)
As Tiffany stated, Sam's experience greatly emphasizes the importance of recognizing the various contexts which are associated with our utterances. In terms of the possible loss of the "essential" meaning of a word that is overused, I understand and agree with the various reasons offered to justify its fallacy: differences in definitions, inability to "judge" a word's "essential" meaning, and language's adaptability.
Nonetheless, I also understand Sam's reasoning that language must have SOME sort of origin or starting point, whether or not "essential" is the best word to describe the initial definition of a word. In short, I DO believe that the expansion of contexts of certain words has led to the "loss" (I use this word lightly) of this initial meaning. When I state this, my only purpose is to explain what many of you have already noted - that as contexts are expanded, words' definitions become expanded as well, and as a result, "older" definitions may become obsolete ("lost") because others are favorable, or are no longer emphasized or thought about in the same fashion since they are used perpetually. A word that fits the latter is, as Sam first mentioned, "corruption."
(Janet Lee)
In regards to Sam's question about the "starting point", I'm finding that while it does exist, its importance is somewhat negligible in our discussion. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that its existence is rather tenuous? After all, the idea of a starting point to something that is hardly crisply defined is somewhat murky.
Have you ever noticed that dictionaries often offer multiple origins? For instance:
Raze
ME rasen < MF raser < *VL rāsāre to scrape, freq. of L rādere to scrape
If you continue to look back, chances are you're going to find it difficult to see where a word starts. After all, words don't usually spring into existence out of nowhere. What would you consider to be the "starting" point? When can you honestly say (definitively) that there's no need to keep breaking down a word - that you've found the word in its most "essential" form?
It's all too subjective to provide a definitive answer to. (Especially at this hour. xD)
When it comes to words like "corruption", and certainly any word, I guess, context is critical. The more meanings a word has the more critical the context. Take "love" as another example. I'm sure that when I say "I love my new sweater" you do not think I mean the same thing as when I say "I love my family." As I said, context is critical and essential when trying to determine the meaning of a word that could be ambiguous.
Regarding the triteness of a word, I think words can certainly become trite over time. Again, take love, for example. The English language only has one word that can have so many different meanings. If I use "love" to describe the way I feel about clothes, food, animals, and people, the people might feel like they're getting the raw end of the deal. The idea, though, is that context matters. As long as the particular emotion is attached to the word, the meaning should get across just fine (it doesn't always happen that way, though...).
Emily T.
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