TEXT 3

Incidents like this are happening every day. A teacher in a college English course has returned a student’s theme on the subject of a poem. One sentence in the theme reads, “Like all of Keats’s best work, the ‘Ode to Autumn’ has a sensual quality that makes it especially appealing to me.” The instructor’s red pencil has underlined the word sensual, and in the margin he has written “Accurate?” or whatever his customary comment is in such cases. The student has checked the dictionary and comes back puzzled. “I don’t see what you mean,” he says. “The dictionary says sensual means ‘of or pertaining to the sense or physical sensation.’ And that’s what I wanted to say. Keats’s poem is filled with words and images that suggest physical sensation.”

“Yes,” replies the instructor, “that’s what the word means—according to the dictionary.” And then he takes his copy of the American College Dictionary, which contains the definition the student quoted, and turns to the word sensual. “Look here,” he says, pointing to a passage in small type just after the various definitions of the word:

SENSUAL, SENSUOUS refer to experience through the senses. SENSUAL refers, usually unfavorably, to the enjoyments derived from the senses, generally implying grossness or lewdness: a sensual delight in eating, sensual excesses. SENSUOUS refers, favorably or literally, to what is experienced through the senses: sensuous impressions, sensuous poetry.

The student reads the passage carefully and begins to see light. The word sensual carries with it a shade of meaning, an unfavorable implication, which he did not intend; the word he wanted was sensuous. He has had a useful lesson in the dangers of taking dictionary definitions uncritically, as well as in the vital difference between denotation and connotation.

The difference between the two is succinctly phrased in another of those small-type paragraphs of explanation, taken this time from Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary:

Denote implies all that strictly belongs to the definition of the word, connote all of the ideas that are suggested by the term; thus, “home” denotes the place where one lives with one’s family, but it usually connotes comfort, intimacy, and privacy. The same implications distinguish denotation and connotation.

The denotation of a word is its dictionary definition, which is what the word “stands for.” According to the dictionary, sensuous and sensual have the same general denotation: they agree in meaning “experience through the senses.” Yet they suggest different things. And that difference in suggestion constitutes a difference in connotation.

Nothing is more essential to intelligent, profitable reading than sensitivity to connotation. Only when we possess such sensitivity can we understand both what the author means, which may be quite plain, and what he wants to suggest, which may actually be far more important than the superficial meaning. The difference between reading a book, a story, an essay, or a poem for surface meaning and reading it for implication is the difference between listening to the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra on a battered old transistor radio and listening to it on a high-fidelity stereophonic record player. Only the latter brings out the nuances that are often more significant than the obvious, and therefore easily comprehended, meaning.

An unfailing awareness of the connotative power of words is just as vital, of course, to the writer. His ceaseless task is to select the word which will convey exactly what he wants to say. The practiced writer, like the practiced reader, derives his skill from his awareness that though many words may have substantially the same denotation, few are exactly synonymous in connotation. The inexperienced writer, forgetting this, often has recourse to a book like Roget’s Thesaurus, where he finds, conveniently assembled, whole regiments of synonyms; not knowing which to choose, he either closes his eyes and picks a word at random or else chooses the one that “sounds” best. In either case he is neglecting the delicate shadings in implication and applicability which differentiate each word in a category from its neighbors. Wishing to refer to the familiar terse expressions of wisdom in the Bible, for example, he has a number of roughly synonymous words at his disposal: maxim, aphorism, apothegm, dictum, adage, proverb, epigram, saw, byword, motto, among others.

But if he chooses saw or epigram he chooses wrongly; for neither of these words is suitable to designate biblical quotations. (why?) The way to avoid the all too frequent mistake of picking the wrong word from a list is to refer to those invaluable paragraphs in the dictionary which discriminate among the various words in a closely related group. (If the definition of the word in question is not followed by such a paragraph, there usually is a cross reference to the place where the differentiation is made.) For further help, consult the fuller discussions, illustrated by examples quoted from good writers, in Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms. But cheap pocket and desk dictionaries should always be avoided in any work involving word choice. They are frequently misleading because they oversimplify entries which are already reduced to a minimum in the large, more authoritative dictionaries.

What has been said so far does not mean that the conscientious reader or writer is required to take up every single word and examine it for implications and subsurface meanings. Many words—articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and some adverbs—have no connotative powers, because they do not represent ideas but are used to connect ideas or to show some other relationship between them. Still other words, such as (usually) polysyllabled scientific or technical term, have few if any connotation; that is, they call forth no vivid pictures, no emotional responses. The fact remains, however, that most words which stand for ideas have some connotation, however limited, simply because ideas themselves have connotations, some technical words, especially when they affect our daily lives, take on more and more connotation as they become familiar: intravenous, angina pectoris, anxiety neurosis, for example.

Why does the author describe the incident about a college teacher commenting on a student’s theme?

What is intelligent and profitable reading?

An awareness of the connotation of words is ________.

The rhetorical device used in the underlined sentence is ________.

Why do some words have no connotative meaning?