I love it. Ben, if you’re reading this, you should do the same with your students.
Via this week’s PostSecret.
Tagged
vocabulary
By Jesse Sheidlower, via dailymeh.
People feel that there is a certain kind of language that’s appropriate and a certain type that isn’t appropriate. And these judgments are based on many things—some may make sense, some might not. People take these things very seriously. People are told things about the language in school that are demonstrably untrue, and they think anyone who doesn’t follow along with those beliefs is stupid or wrong.
I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not — there are no words to express some things except religious words. For instance, ‘soul.’ I don’t believe in an afterlife or heaven or hell, yet there isn’t a secular word for that feeling that we are not only flesh and blood. Whether you’re religious or not you may find yourself obliged to use language shaped by religion.
Justice Ginsburg:Are those the only two words in the FCC's new policy or are there other words on the list?
General Garre [FCC]:Well, certainly, the FCC's action in this case focuses on the use of the F-Word and the S-Word, and I think everyone acknowledges that a word like the F-Word is one of the most graphic, explicit, and vulgar words in the English language for sexual activity. And I think even the networks here concede that it was -- its use was gratuitous and inappropriate here. And that would control --
Justice Stevens:Isn't it true that -- isn't it true that that is a word that often is used with -- with no reference whatsoever to the -- the sexual connotation?
General Garre:It can be -- it certainly can be used in a non-literal way. It can be used in a metaphorical way, as Cher used it here, to say "F them" to her critics. But the -- the non-literal/literal distinction is not unique to the isolated expletives versus the repeated effort -- expletives.
Justice Stevens:You think it's equally -- it's equally subject to being treated as indecent within the meaning of the statute regardless of which meaning was actually apparent to everybody who listened to it?
General Garre:I wouldn't say equally, Justice Stevens, but what we would say is that it can qualify as indecent under the -- under the Commission's definition, because even the non-literal use of a word like the F-Word, because of its core meaning of that word as one of the most vulgar, graphic, and explicit words for sexual activity in the English language, it inevitably conjures up a core sexual image.
....
Justice Stevens:Maybe I shouldn't ask this, but is there ever appropriate [sic] for the Commission to take into consideration at all the question whether the particular remark was really hilarious, very, very funny? Some of these things you can't help but laugh at. Is that -- is that a proper consideration, do you think?
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Source:http://www.supremecourtus.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts.html
Limerence, as posited by psychologist Dorothy Tennov, is an attempt at a scientific study into the nature of romantic love. The meaning of the word, which was coined by Tennov in 1977, is an involuntary cognitive and emotional state in which a person feels an intense romantic desire for another person, the limerent object.
It is characterized by intrusive thinking and pronounced sensitivity to external events that reflect the disposition of the limerent object towards the individual. It can be experienced as intense joy or as extreme despair, depending on whether the feelings are reciprocated. Unlike English, many other languages have traditional terms to denote limerence, like in German Verliebtheit or Russian влюблённость (vlyublyonnost); both expressions may roughly be translated to “fallen-in-love-ness.”
The word ogre is of French derivation, and was originally believed to have been coined by either Charles Perrault (1628-1703) or Marie-Catherine Jumelle de Berneville, Comtesse d’ Aulnoy (1650-1705), both of whom were French authors. Other sources say that the name is derived from the word Hongrois, which means Hungarian.
Nowadays, the word is thought to have been actually inspired by the works of Italian author Giambattista Basile (1575-1632), who used the Neapolitan word uerco, in standard Italian orco. This word is documented in earlier Italian works (Fazio degli Uberti, XIV cent.; Luigi Pulci, XV; Ludovico Ariosto, XV-XVI) and has even older cognates with the Latin orcus and the Old English orcneas found in Beowulf lines 112-113, which inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s Orc. All these words may derive from a shared Indo-European mythological concept (as Tolkien himself speculated, as cited by Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth, 45).
The first appearance of the word ogre in Perrault’s work occurred in his Histoires ou Contes du temps Passé (1697). It later appeared in several of his other fairy tales, many of which were based on the Neapolitan tales of Basile. The first example of a female ogre being referred to as an ogress is found in his version of Sleeping Beauty, where it is spelled ogresse. The Comtesse d’ Aulnoy first employed the word ogre in her story L’Orangier et l’ Abeille (1698), and was the first to use the word ogree to refer to the creature’s offspring.
The term is often applied in a metaphorical sense to disgusting persons who exploit, brutalize or devour their victim.
Text from Monstropedia.
