>
>
> shag carpet bomb wrote:
> >
> > At 10:11 PM 2/25/2009, Philip Pilkington wrote:
> > >People don't focus on
> > >"appearances" or "sounds" of things to create new meaningful words, they
> try
> > >to expand on the past meanings.
>
> Yes. On the past meanings THAT THEY ARE AWARE OF.
No, on this I completely disagree. People DON'T have to be aware of past meanings to integrate them into new meanings; in fact, often they're completely ignorant. People don't mull over an etymological dictionary in order to come up with new terms/meanings; they "free associate". To put it in rather wanky terms: language functions like poetry.
People just simply "generate" meaning through the past terms they internalised. This would be, AND PLEASE THINK ABOUT THIS, a major argument for historical determinism... be it materialist or otherwise... To say that people constantly create new meanings out of past meanings that they are AWARE of completely nullifies Marx's conception of history and his notion of ideology.