Oral Practice Through Stylistic Analysis [antikvár]

CONNOTATION (From Preface to Critical Reading by R. Altick) Not all words possess connotative power. Articles, conjunctions, prepositions, many common adverbs (well, badly, thoroughly, etc.) lack connotative qualities because they are words used to connect ideas and to show relationship between them, or to modify their meaning; these parts of speech do not themselves stand for ideas. But most words which stand for ideas have connotations, even though they are often scarcely perceptible. That is because ideas themselves have connotations: they produce somé sort of intellectual or emotional reaction inside us. [...] There are two types of connotation: personal and generál. Personal connotations are the result of the experience of the individual man or woman. The way we react to ideas and objects, and thus to the words that stand for those ccreferents", is determined by the precise nature of our earlier experience with the referents. Taken all together, the connotations that surround most of the words in our vocabulary are a complex and intimate record of our life to date. Our present reaction to a word may be the cumulative result of all our experiences with the word and its referent. In the case of other words, our reaction may have been determined once and for all by an early or a particularly memorable experience with them. A student's reaction to the word teacher, for instance, may be determined by all his experience with teachers, which has been subtly synthesized, in the course of time, into a single image or emotional response. In it are mingled memories of Miss Smith, the first-grade teacher who dried his tears when he lost a fight in the schoolyard at recess; of Miss Jones, the six-grade teacher who bored her pupils with thricetold tales of her trip to Mexico ten years earlier; of Mr.