On Politics and Word Meaning (with video)

I begin with Mark Forsyth's entertaining video clip discussing the etymology of a few political terms and conclude with George Orwell's more serious essay on politics and communication.

A number of Vocabulogic posts have explored how words tend to change in form, meaning, and usage over time, referencing the study of etymology. For example, in one post I describe how the Common Core State Standards include the study of etymology in high school English classes. See Etymology and Morphology Standards. In another post, Shane Templeton discusses how word meanings change over time and are "more than the sum of their parts".

Along the same lines, I offer an interesting video, courtesy of TED Talks. With plenty of humor and some embellishment, etymologist Mark Forsyth makes the point that words change meaning based on the usage at the time. Try as we might, we cannot control word meaning, nor cast it in cement. It is likely to take on a life of its own. Speechifiers take note!
Forsyth states:

"Politicians try to pick words and use words to shape reality and control reality, but in fact, reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality.”

Forsyth discusses two political terms, snollygoster and president. What's a snollygoster?  By the sound of the word, and knowing it is used to describe politicians, I suppose we can all guess.

Of more relevance, Forsyth explores how the term president came to reference the "chief executive officer for the US" and how its connotations have drastically changed since first applied to George Washington. The bit about the US Senate may be somewhat apocryphal, as some have suggested, but the story is entertaining and provides us with word-sleuthing material.

This short video might perhaps be interesting to secondary and tertiary students studying civics, US History, or etymology. The video runs 6.26 minutes, published June 2012. Watch it below, or view it directly at the site, TED.com.

Politicians and Language: 

How do the words we use reflect our personality? James (Jamie) W. Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas, analyzed the speech patterns used during the debate between President Obama and Governor Romney. His analysis includes the use of pronouns and function words as well as content words and positively or negatively charged phrases. He compares the two candidates to former Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Reagan. View his brief interview at Wordwatcher,  a You Tube channel hosted by UT Austin. You might be surprised at his analysis.

ALSO, if the relationship between words, ideas, and communication interests you, see George Orwell's essay, Politics and the English Language, published in 1946. I found it online, courtesy of Vincent Ferraro, Professor of International Politics at Mount Holyoke.

Citing five excerpts from various publications, Orwell shows how words can muddle our thinking -- how easily we can confuse ourselves and our audience with unclear language -- and not necessarily intentionally. But politicians on both sides of the aisle have been known to muddy the waters, as Orwell shows. He offers sound advice for anyone who wants to improve both their thought processes and their communication, concluding with the following statement:

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

The Power of Words

 Joyeux Noël
 

The elves are making merry--no Sunday post today, but if you've a moment, reflect on The Power of Words, a brief video created in the UK by Purple Feather. This video illustrates several topics discussed in Vocabulogic, especially word choice and connotations. It's received millions of hits, so perhaps you have seen it. Thanks to Lynn for sharing!

It has been a treat to correspond with you this year.
I look forward to "seeing" you in 2012.

Susan

 

Word Clouds, Key Concepts and Historic Proclamations

Recently, a blogger sent me a link to Jonathan Feinberg's Wordle website, a free program that transforms raw text into seemingly endless stylized arrangements. Words are sized in proportion to how often they occur in the text.

To create this image of the Declaration of Independence (original text) I set Wordle to display a maximum of 60 words and to ignore common high frequency words (e.g., a, the, and, for). Then, I pressed "Randomize" repeatedly until I saw an arrangement I liked.

Teachers could use this type of word cloud to inform lesson planning, on the premise that recurring words might be important. (Vocabulary Brief offers more details on selecting words worth teaching).

A word cloud might also prompt conversations. Hopefully, peers would discuss patterns in word placement and linkages across words and in doing so would make associations across concepts. A word cloud might help students see the big picture and understand essential ideas. It is a type of concept map.

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed colonial liberty from English rule, and we celebrate this on the Fourth of July, but we need to remember another war and several more proclamations. In Texas especially and increasingly throughout the nation, Juneteenth is a day of celebration commemorating the abolition of slavery. This word appears to be a blend of June and nineteenth, named so because on the 19th of June, 1865, Union soldiers finally reached Galveston, Texas to proclaim the long war over, the slaves free. Imagine the shock, the tears, the jubilee. Note that the message did not reach the Gulf shores until two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. For nearly 150 years, former slaves and their descendants from the Galveston area have kept this day in living memory. On Juneteenth we can also celebrate the adoption and proclamation of the Thirteenth Amendment.

 
Along those lines, another proclamation of sorts: Here are the top 20 words in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (original text). If I were a history teacher, I could use this Wordle to decide which vocabulary words to pre-teach. We could discuss why Lincoln chose to return again and again to these particular words and why this speech was so effective.

Teachers might also use a word cloud to illustrate the value of word choice, the power of connotations, to foster word consciousness, and to help students monitor repetition in writing samples. Teachers and students might create and publish word clouds from coursework, famous poems, essays, speeches, short stories, etc. Thanks to open source texts (see Project Guttenberg, for example, or Page By Page Books) we can easily copy and paste text into any program that creates clouds. No need to insert the entire text--it can be interesting to see what comes of a few paragraphs.

This free technology is applicable to younger children, too. Readers may know the children's jingle, illustrated below. The riddle is only two sentences, so I did not exclude common English words. Click image to expand. 

Enjoy the day!

Connotations and Denotations (poll)

Definitions are denotations.What does the word snob denote? The emotions, images, and visceral responses associated with a word are called connotations. What does snob connote?

Connotations can be positive, neutral, or negative and they are subjective, unique to the individual, even though most people would probably respond positively to fireplace and negatively to arson. English language learners in particular may struggle to grasp connotations. Consider the similar denotations but differing connotations of the words relaxed, inactive, and lazy. I’d prefer to be viewed as relaxed rather than lazy, wouldn’t you?

Now to the poll results. Of 266 voters, 200 (75%) felt that snobbish was more insulting than smug. These two negatively charged words share similar but not identical denotations. I was curious to learn if the affective associations triggered by the words varied widely. The finding was surprising—in my perceptual lens, smug is more insulting, more negative. The word reeks of superiority. I was in the minority. One can only guess at the personal experiences that triggered the varied responses but a few comments provide clues:

One blogger said, “Smug is worse because people are not snobbish about everything, only some things. If people are smug, they are always smug, because it’s in them, a part of their personality.”

An email stated, “I down-rated smug because the mind is set and arrogant whereas snobbish is because of birth, but context makes a difference.”

A college student wrote, “I would have to say I would much rather be called smug than snobbish. I just don't like the word snob, I guess.”

Another blogger said, “I think snobbish is more universally insulting because many people aren’t sure what smug means, but nobody likes a snob.” 

Do fewer people know what smug means? To investigate, I consulted The Educator’s Word Frequency Guide, a corpus created by Zeno, Ivens, Millard, and Duvvuri (1995). In the listing, the frequency of smug was greater than that of snobbish, but neither word appears frequently in English texts (0.5436 versus 0.1431 appearances per million words). Even when all forms of smug (that is, smug, smugly, smugness) were tallied against snob, snobs, snobbish, snobbishly and snobbishness, the smug family had a higher total frequency (1.0429 versus 0.6497). Thus, based on the written word, smug should be known at least as well as snobbish, but we must also consider the frequency of spoken words, and there is no data base for that to my knowledge. It is possible that we hear snob more frequently than smug.

At any rate, the implications are clear—words can trigger surprising and differing emotional responses. Students need to be aware of this. Perceptions are key to language processing. Communication (including reading comprehension) depends not only on understanding a word’s denotation but also its connotation. 

Classroom application: After the denotations of a handful of near-synonyms are learned, why not vote on their connotations with sealed ballots? Discuss the rationale behind the vote. Such discussion should prompt thinking, learning and memory. This task should be accessible to everyone as long as the denotations are known. 

These types of engaging tasks will motivate most students and may kindle interest in words and phrases, especially needful for children of poverty. Word consciousness should develop along with explicit knowledge of a word's denotations and connotations. Furthermore, writing might well improve as students become discerning with respect to word selection (see poetry post). I have not found rigorous evidence to support these claims but the theory is sound and a few promising studies offer support for the idea, including the study described in the prior post, carried out by Baumann, Ware, and Edwards, 2007 (and see Graves, 2006; Scott, Skobel, & Wells, 2008).

      

References:

• Graves, M.F. (2006). The vocabulary book: Learning and instruction. New York: Teachers College Press. 
• Scott, J., Skobel, B., & Wells, J. (2008). The word-conscious classroom: Building the vocabulary readers and writers need.   New York: Scholastic - Theory into Practice Series.  
• Zeno, S. M., Ivens, S. H., Millard, R. T., & Duvvuri, R. (1995). The educator’s word frequency guide. New York: Touchstone Applied Science Associates, Inc.

Blends, Word Play Offs, Sweet Tooth Fairies

Types of Blends
Click to enlarge.
(Gries, 2004)

Slanguage. Spanglish. Vocabulogic. Linguists call these types of words "blends" but they are more like collisions, because two words are smashed together, leaving out at least one letter in the process, merging sounds and meanings.  A blend is also called a portmanteau, a two-sided suitcase, so coined by Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland.  Michael Quinion describes blends more fully at World Wide Words. Examples include brunch (breakfast + lunch) and spam (spiced + ham). The other day, I encouraged a friend to "Enjoy the bruncheon" (thus using an established blend to spontaneously create a new blend). Click the image above to learn about different types of blends, but see my footnote. Read how blends reflect pop culture at the Lewis Carroll Society. 

Like churnalism, many of the neologisms "spied upon" by Paul McFedries are blends, reflecting the fact that blending has become fairly common. Word blending is a morphological process, just another way to create words. I have yet to read a study that measures the ability to construct or deconstruct a blend. Probably of low priority, but something to think about.

Note: A blend is similar to -- but not the same as -- a contraction: isn't, she's, you'll, etc. A blend is like a contraction in that they both involve smashing words together and omitting letters. However, a blend creates a new meaning. For instance, the blend emoticon denotes (and connotes) more than simply emotion + icon. In contrast, a contraction restates the meaning of the two words (wasn't denotes was not). Furthermore, in a contraction an apostrophe is inserted where the missing letter(s) would have been. 

The clever concoction fantabulous, used in the banner below to advertise the philanthropic and free (!!) vocabulary quiz-game Free Rice, is a blend of fantastic and fabulous.
 

Somewhat like a blend, a "sweet tooth fairy" is a new kind of word, created by Graham Hidderley/Burgess (see WordNik and Boston Globe). To create a sweet tooth fairy one combines two concepts (e.g., sweet tooth + tooth fairy). The final word of the first concept must match the first word of the second one. Delete the duplicated word, hence sweet tooth + tooth fairy  >>>  sweet tooth fairy (xy + yz = xyz).

Some popular sweet tooth fairies:
stop sign language
world peace train
magnetic personality disorder
complete chaos theory
social butterfly kisses
false economy size (see comments)

Want to interest students in words and phrases? Add blends and sweet tooth fairies to your fresh bread basket of ideas. Let the class construct and deconstruct them with peers, discussing them, rating their utility and appeal, using them in writing samples. Who knows where it might end! Start a contest, where the most creative inventors go to the word play offs.This is lots of fun should boost verbal proficiency. 

 Learn more about word play in chapter three of The Word Conscious Classroom (Scott, Skobel, & Wells, 2008). Scott et al. suggest that fostering an interest in words is especially promising for learners who are not surrounded with an enriched verbal environment at home. They say: 

An awareness of words, a love of words, and a curiosity about words do not just develop by themselves. Students who can recognize powerful language and use it themselves in their writing have developed this awareness through scaffolding by adults in their lives" (p. 12).

Depending on the skill level, the act of constructing and/or deconstructing a blend should deepen linguistic insight. Over the holiday, why not create a few blends and sweet tooth fairies. Engage in a little verbal volley. Go on, make some jelly bean soup! Be an Easter egg head.


 
Note: There are at least three types of blends and linguists do not always agree on what constitutes a blend, but for the purpose of understanding English words, it should be sufficient to simply identify the words that combine to form the blend and discuss the new meaning created by the blend.


REFERENCES 

• Aronoff, M., & Fudeman, K. (2005). What is morphology? Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.  
  
• Gries, Stefan Th. (2004) Some characteristics of English morphological blends. Andronis, Mary A., Erin Debenport, Anne Pycha, Keiko Yoshimura, eds. Papers from the 38th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society: Vol. II. The Panels. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistics Society, 201-216.
• Scott, J., Skobel, B., & Wells, J. (2008). The word-conscious classroom: Building the vocabulary readers and writers need. New York: Scholastic - Theory into Practice Series.