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.
We rely on words to define us. If we try to express a specific condition without the right words attached, we become lost and we are unable to clearly understand each other. While teaching one of my Public Health courses, a group discussion about clinical depression led us into an examination of the word “depression” and how the home cultures of some of the students’ parents did not allow, or define, the concept of “depression” in a serious, medical, sense.
Wordle is a fascinating online service that takes a bunch of text, or an RSS feed, and then mashes it all together to create a word cloud of ideas. Here’s the Wordle mash for the Urban Semiotic Atom feed. It’s wild to see the words that pop out at you and, reading it semiotically to form sentences out of the cloud, I see “Twitter new know stream.” and “American religion good people.” What semoitic sentences does your mind form in the following pareidoliac clouds?
My new book is here; your time to buy is now!
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Sometimes we are unaware of what we have written.
Our words always become ghosts to us and they haunt us in the quiet moments if we are not cogent of their power to harm when we create meaning by solidifying thoughts into form and placing words against each other for context.
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