Wordplay

Elaine @thewebrecluse

January 19 2023 10:34am

Something I lectured on when teaching Basic Of Communication was the concept of Preferred Connotation (PC).

I don’t teach PC much now in my Media Therapy class because I can’t take a student that has low communication ability. Media Therapy requires high levels of communication and PC is the opposite of that.

When I am in a conversation with someone and they say things like “this is what it means to me”, I immediately know that I am dealing with someone who lives in an alternate reality … and that means no communication is possible until a dictionary is pulled out and actual terms are defined between both persons. This isn’t always possible to do with mentally unstable people so sometimes it’s just best to walk away. But if you CAN define terms then that’s epic.

PC is CHOOSING an idea or feeling that a word invokes OVER its literal, primary, or established meaning.

These are going to be words that have connotations that differ from person to person based on their lived experiences, something that is impossible to know from stranger to stranger.

So how do you determine what dictionary they generally use before you engage in a conversation with someone? Asking invasive question? Making assumptions? Relying on bias or assumptions of empathy?

You could try all of that sure … but you probably know how much time that would take and it’s not going to be very effective.

In Basics Of Communications we talked a lot about how to mitigate communication problems by using high levels of awareness of the reality of communication for each person. You have to start from the idea that MANY people are operating mentally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally from a different reality than you and how that changes how they communicate.

Then you add on things like culture, religion, sociology, politics, education, etc … and you get an entirely different frame of reference for communicating and entirely different preferred connotations as well.

Usually the students are asking “With all of those factors how can we hope to communicate effectively with people?” … and I’m always happy to respond with …

You can’t.

And then we watch Rockne S. O’Bannon’s BRILLIANT Wordplay episode of The Twilight Zone.

That episode is a brilliant examination of aphasia … but I also tell my students to consider it as a great example of how I feel when I’m talking to most people … except there is no book you can refer to in order to begin relearning every single person’s individual dictionary or preferred connotations.

Add ALL to this my post from yesterday about how most people primarily use LOT skills and are lacking in self-awareness and HOT skills.

Talking to people is a nightmare.

Would it surprise you to know that many people don’t know how to accurately define a lot of the words that they have automatically triggered responses to? Or that the definitions they believe these words have are often incorrect?

Connotation: a secondary signification, that which is included in the meaning of a word besides its primary denotation; the abstract meaning or intension of a term.

Intension and intention are NOT the same word and shouldn’t be confused – though they often are. When we talk about language, we talk about intension which refers to the collection of properties we use to identify something as an example of a given word.

Connotation INCLUDES elements of word intension which is more concept content than meaning.

Most people react to connotation and word intension – the properties that the word carries with it – and may not have a real understanding of the actual meaning at all, only it’s emotional effects upon them. Meaning is often lost completely.

Personal dictionaries are formed mainly of word intensions taken from that person’s individual reality.

Being able to comprehend words in someone’s personal dictionary means having a complete understanding of all properties – emotional and literal – that go into their meanings for things.

Simply put: The idea of the word + the physical form of the word + personal connotation and intension = meaning of the word.

Good luck deciphering that from person to person.