Loaded Words

Chapter 5's section "Words with Built-in Judgments" was especially thought-provoking to me. Words only acquire attached affective connotation if people use it with those attached feelings. I noticed that specific definitions in dictionaries have the words "usually offensive" included or something similar. And since dictionaries only record how words are used, it follows that certain words must have been used offensively. However, prior to that, earlier editions of dictionaries would not have included "usually offensive" or "sometimes vulgar", because there was a time when it only had an informative connotation -- at one point, "ass" was only used to refer to donkeys.

The manner in which words obtain built-in judgment is a two way street. The way people inflict words with negative connotation or positive connotation is received negatively or positively. When a word is used frequently enough with a specific meaning, eventually its definition in the dictionary will be recorded as such. But afterward, conflict often ensues as one person intends only to use the word with its informative connotation but another person receives it with its affective connotation. At that point, those words don't even have a distinction between its informative and its affective connotation, both are integrated too closely together to use one without the other. Examples of these words include swear words that were once completely innocent (a**, b*tch) and words describing race that are replaced by other words to describe the same race.

Hayakawa's example in Language in Thought and Action shows that the word "Negro" was replaced by "colored," "nigger," "nigrah," and later "black." But then "African-American" was substituted for "black." This progression demonstrates how people used different words to describe the same thing, and then how people received it. If society had never used the n-word negatively, and in turn had never received it negatively, there would be no cause to think of a new word.

-- tori lee