image by Jeff Sheldon for resplashed.com
This week our winners are Elizabeth Fein of www.iteratesocial.com, who has won a $100 photojojo gift card, and Cylinda of Arenofamily.com who has won a $50 amazon gift card to spend in the mightygirl.com book club.
One thing I’m neck-deep in this week is the role of linguistics in the way we portray ourselves online. Most verbal beings use language to construct our own identity even in our own heads. Many people with autism think in pictures, or visual representations, but most of us think in words. (Hence the “voice” inside our heads.) So even when we are creating and constructing our selves and the public versions of ourselves, we can only use words that existed before us and outside of us to do it. (Unless you are a neologist; a word creator).
The structure then that language imposes on our identity can be similar to the way we often have to use commonly understood genres or stereotypes in order to communicate meaning. These tools help us to convey meaning, but they also restrict the scope of the meaning we can convey, as each word or convention brings with it a lot of baggage. Here’s an old NYT article about the linguistic problem of naming women who are not working outside of the home, but certainly cannot be said to be “non-working.” One of the closing thoughts is, “I think we might just have to grin and bear the fact that our language can't always be succinct and meaningful at the same time.” Something to think about as you choose which words and aphorisms you’ll adopt in your writing.
