Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Question 1 Week 4
Building words refers to more the use of the word rather then what its original meaning is. The literally meaning of a word can be one thing but what its practical use is the way a certain society has built the word gives it a different meaning. This I believe is true from region to region country to country and even age group to age group. A word that comes to the top of my head right away is "bad". The word bad has a negative meaning but in certain age groups when someone says wow that care looks bad, it actually implies how nice it looks. I see this misunderstanding a lot when younger generation speaks to the older generations because the younger generation has built the word differently.
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When you are talking about different age groups, social groups and different regions of the country, their are different meanings for words that have been built. I believe it is a sense of culture identity and a sense of uniqueness that people want to build. You say the word bad can be a term for something good. If used in the right way and with the right tone then yes it can be used for good. I dont think using the term for good in another culture would be effective because the word has not been built into the cultures vocabulary. Building a word into the culture gives people a sense of unique distinction and a sense of connection that has been built throughout cultures worldwide and makes everyones culture great.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the both of you. Social constructionism emphasizes the importance of culture and context in understanding what occurs in society and constructing knowledge based on this understanding. And I believe that in this definition, culture not only means ethnicity, but also age, gender, time period, etc. Language is always context-determined: words depend on other words and on the world to which they refer and relate. Many different aspects makeup the context, so everyone's understanding is different, depending on their "world."
ReplyDeleteAs the Oxford Companion to Philosophy puts it:
"A context of a form of words is intensional if its truth is dependent on the meaning, and not just the reference, of its component words, or on the meanings, and not just the truth-value, of any of its sub-clauses."