Words and meaning can create different contexts based on cultural usage alone. While English speakers prefer to assign blame — “She broke the bowl!” — Spanish and Japanese cultures focus more on the event — “The bowl broke itself.” That sort of action shifting can make a mess when it comes to universal human understanding and, yet, we wouldn’t want it any other way.
The killing of Neda Agha-Soltan during the election turmoil in Iran has become an instant semiotic full of rage and mortal memeing. Neda’s bloody death mask is now the face of hope for repressed Iranian citizens looking for a way out of the morass of religious repression.
Yesterday, during an intensive discussion of murdered doctor George Tiller,
I made this comment concerning the Hegelian idea of tragedy:
As my first attorney told me: “If no one on either side is happy after I write up a contract, then I know I’ve done my job.”
I spend a lot of time on the internet and lately I’ve seen the following blue avatar popping up in use many different places by separate people. Have you seen this blue image before? If so, do you know its semiotic and semantic meanings?
If you’re a word lover, then you’ll go bonkers for the fun and learning you can have with Visual Thesaurus. Just type in your word and you’ll be presented with an associative visual mapping. In the example below, I keyed in “duplicitous” as my base word. The various branches extend the meaning and history of the word with other words. Hover over any of the words in the Visual Thesaurus interactive box and you’ll be presented with extended definitions.
“Qui tacet consentire videtur” is a Latin phrase the law translates into: “Silence equals consent.”
Continue reading → The Horror of Qui Tacet Consentire Videtur
I’m sure you’ve met them before — the people that do a thousand things yet have no meaning or magnitude attached to the learning in the experience. They live overwhelmed and without wonder.
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