EDNote: My previous effort to forward this post, last Wednesday,
apparently failed. Here it is at last. ~SB
-------- Original Message --------
Dear gospodin Stan,
>> Such generalized connotations are NOT our personal CHOICE,
>> citoyen-comrade!
>>
>> How LANGUAGE really works (trust me and the Gnoams!): X uses a
word W
>> with an
>> intended semantic-range S(X,W) = [XWs1 ... XWsn]; Y
reads/hears W with a
>> transformed semantic-range S(Y,W) = [YWs1 ... YWsm]. After
>> inner-diambiguations and decontextualizations (left as a
Chomskian
>> exorcize
You will not frighten me with mathematical notation, even with
sexual connotation, you know.
I agree that they (connotaions)
are not always our personal choice, but it depends
on us - overemphasize them or not. I can invent a context to give
ANY word sexual connotations. A question is - who invented the context,
an author or a commentator. To some it may be an exercice, to others -
exorcism (maybe Chomskian...). When I hear modern discussions, in
particlar discussions about "sexism", I think often that the real
sexism is to obsessively sexualise everything, and preferences for male
or
female are secondary even if many militants may disagree.
There
are also the contexts that desexualize even the words with direct
sexual meaning. A story I've heard from some old person who was
prisoner in a soviet camp and worked felling the trees was that
they used the word for male organ instead of "right" and for
female for "left" to alert other people when the tall tree
was falling left or right. It was not an amusement park and
they were mortally exhausted, and the sexual meaning was downplayed
if remembered at all in this situation.
I think it all is related to how we comment on VN.
S kommunisticheskim privetom
Sergei Soloviev