But I don't think it's just about isolating a single word or phrase. I think it's just as important to see the meaning of a word in relation to another word that it is commonly used with. Or how space and time affects the meaning of words. "He was with us" could be someone passed away or that someone physically was in the presence in one instance and left to be in another physical area. "I saw the president" could mean you physically saw him live or on a documentary.
Two easy terms for an example are caught and found. Caught always carries a negative connotation. It implies that whatever the subject of the sentence was doing was wrong, unethical, or illegal. Found has more innocence and less malice in it's meaning. However, both terms can be understood through context, which is why I believe semantics is overlooked, because context helps people understand the main point of a sentence.
"I caught him at the store"
"I found him at the store"
While we can understand both sentences to mean that one person interacted in some way with another in a store, caught is an incriminating word and ambiguous. The word caught doesn't explicitly say whether the person saw the other person with their eyes or grabbed the person with their hands. Yet either one could be a correct interpretation while still carrying negative connotations. Whereas 'found' has little if any physical touch behind its meaning. Found is a word connected with visuals from the eyes. Found is also attached to another preceding concept. For something to be found, it has to be lost. So found introduces the concept that one person is purposely out to find the other in a store.
Understanding these differences is key for a copy editor because plenty of words are loaded with different interpretations and meanings. One point of journalism is to effectively communicate. And effective communication can not be reached if the people in journalism do not understand the words they're using.
Additionally, I do know there is a branch of philosophy that argues that words never mean what we actually think they mean. And I'm just mentioning that to show how deep semantics can be argued or thought about.
Here are three examples of loaded terms from other news sources.
http://nypost.com/2015/11/04/more-than-half-of-black-millennials-say-they-know-or-have-been-victims-of-police-abuse/
In this image, it could be "whites" and "Latinos"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/05/psychiatry-doesnt-recognize-orthorexia-an-obsession-with-healthy-eating-but-the-internet-does/
In this image, the loaded term is "purity".
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/05/us/illinois-police-officers-shooting-was-suicide-officials-say.html
In this image, the loaded term is "conservatives".
No comments:
Post a Comment