Mongoose, 9/3

One of the things that caught my attention most from this past week’s class was the notion of language giving us meaning rather than meaning giving us language. One way we explain this is to say that language is completely arbitrary, meaning it has absolutely no meaning, we provide the meaning. We refer to the things we wear on our feet as shoes simply because that is what we have been taught to call them; someone somewhere down the line decided to call these things shoes and they continued to be known as shoes. Shoes could have just easily been named ‘dogs’ and it would not change what they are. This is just to show exactly how arbitrary words are, at some point somebody designated a word to certain items and it stuck, I think this is what makes language exciting, the fact that we control our own destiny with it. Certain groups of people have their own unique words for situations, people things etc. and nobody can take that away from you; language is an area of life where one is allowed to be as creative as he chooses to be or as bland as he likes. This creativity and diversity of words was shown in our class activity in which individuals and groups assigned meaning to the words ‘baby’, ‘shoes’, and ‘never worn’. It was amazing to see the differentiation in meaning that individuals assigned to these few arbitrary words; for some it was a story about actual babies and shoes while for others it turned into an action movie with no mention of babies at all. This diversity comes about because words can have so many different meanings to different people and the arbitrary-ness, which we discussed, gives people the freedom to manipulate words into different meanings. This, to me, is what makes language exciting and creative.