Yep, instead of nominating a word for their word of the year, they chose a picture (and did you know that emoticons like this ‘:)’ guy are supposed to be called emojis now?).
Anyone want to submit some of your Blender work to be made the ‘word’ of the year, because apparently the meaning of the word ‘word’ doesn’t really matter anymore (like seen with so many other terms in the English language).
Have at it.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Our Brains See Words as Pictures
Visual Learners Convert Words to Pictures in the Brain And Vice Versa, Says Penn Psychology Study
But if pictures are now words, what would stop people from expanding the definition and making the term completely meaningless in the process?
A healthy language is one where people don’t progressively make more and more words ambiguous in their definition as opposed to a finite and absolute definition. Otherwise it devolves to the linguistic equivalent of swamp gas where you have no idea what meanings are applied to anything coming out of a person’s mouth.
In short, human speech degrades even below the level of the language of animals (where at least they have sounds with specific meaning).
When you look back from cave paintings through hieroglyphs pictures were the original form of written communication, the written word evolved from there. I mean let’s just call it what it is, a drawn image meant to convey something between individuals.
A picture satisfies that definition just as well as a word and apparently both are processed the same way by the brain. Maybe next years word of the year should be a picture of a mime :yes:
The written word is no more than a linear list of pictures.
I think emoticons are just evidence of a changing society, they wouldn’t hold much merit spoken but on mobile devices they hold their own.
The only constant in life is change, my children’s, children will communicate in vastly different ways than we do now, changing technology will dictate that.
Also remember the vast differences in languages across the world. In Africa tribes such as the Khoisan use a series of clicks to communicate and ‘!’ plus other symbols are used to replace consonants.
Languages with pictographs are not new. And there is more then a few that is still in use. And even in English we have our pictograph words that is part of our language. So what that we call them symbols.
Nearly all of us know that that symbol is the biohazard sign. And that symbol or word if you will serves the task of giving the onlooker that one bit of information. They know when they see that word on a box that most likely it is not something you want to lick.
Aye, words are very much the same as pictures, except that words are much more sophisticated in written language. English is tough to master, and if you want to be able to function in society you have to have a firm understanding of it. Essentially what I am saying is that complex languages encourage competence, whereas, people don’t need to be intelligent to understand pictures, and thus have no reason to strive to be so.
The thing is that to preserve the integrity of language, you need to call the ‘emoji’ for what it is, a picture and an alternative form of communication, don’t pretend to say it can also be called a ‘word’.
Some people think a word is essentially a series of pictures, but at best it uses just a limited set and each glyph merely represents a sound found in human speech rather than an emotion or an object. There is a certain specification attached to it.
An emoji is not really the same as an emoticon
Also just because it has been chosen as the word of the year it doesn’t meant it will included in the dictionary itself, it’s more of a cultural expression and note that some previous words have been very UK specific
Maybe the definition of ‘word’ is subject to change, as an evolving species we have to explore such possibilities. Isn’t this what the Oxford dictionary is doing? Challenging the way we see the world and old conventions.
Who knows in the distant future we could find it more efficient and emotionally rewarding to communicate in colour or color as we interface more and more with technology.
But if you make the definition too expansive you turn the word into something that’s fairly meaningless.
Updating definitions is fine, but a term should still be limited to having a small number of uses.
If an alien landed in say America and got out and looked around, they would be hard pressed to say that our written language is not a hybrid between a semi phonetic alphabet and pictorial system. Between safety symbols, Computer Icons, Logo’s and Trademarks, Traffic signs, And for the hells of it go to imgur and see what happens if you meme something using the wrong picture.
Maybe Oxford Dictionary is poking fun at that, Who knows.
The key thing here, tell it like it is.
How many people view the list of images in the Finished Projects forum as something that can also be words and not just pictures…crickets chirp…thought so.
I think the Oxford Dictionary should be able to nominate whatever the hell they want for their own Word of the Year promotion without having to worry about who’s bothered by it.
P.S. I happened to catch an advertisement on TV for a local mechanic and in that ad he said something about listening when your engine ‘talks’ to you such as leaking oil and whatnot. Obviously the engine is not actually talking to you in the traditional sense, but I don’t think his little ad is going to spell the end of the definition of ‘talk’ as we know it.
Pictures and the written word are both forms of communication. Sometimes the written word can be enhanced by the use of pictures and vice verse. Same goes for sound and physical gestures.
We are not compartmentalised beings, language is spreads throughout all our senses.
Language is evolutionary, history shows us that (insert smiley face)
That’s not how dictionaries work. A common word can have many different useages and if it begins to be commonly used in even more uses then you don’t just ignore that because it’s reached some arbitrary limit. Dictionaries are there to reflect how people use language, not to restrict it.
A good language should not allow words to take on so many meanings that it becomes one of the only words you ever need to know. Now you listed a short three letter word that tends to be used a lot to begin with, it’s not as big a deal with those common words as they had a lot of meanings to begin with, but a word can’t be made to mean anything without it losing any semblance of meaning. Besides that, having a rich vocabulary is good for the brain and good for keeping mentally sharp.
Now I am aware of the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, you might think of words when you look at a picture, but the picture in itself is still a picture (when people look at an art gallery they’re not thinking “look at all of these nice looking words”), and should be treated as a known alternative form of language (a form that is visual instead of written).
The visual form of language indeed has the advantage of being fairly universal, but at the cost of not working well with modern day communication with keyboards and the requirement to make a new image for every possible meaning or description.
Everything has a pro and a con, And just because something has a disadvantage in some context or another, Does not mean it is invalid.
And here is the thing about languages. They are not good or bad. They are tools, granted they are in a way living tools, But they are tools used for communication.
Now ace, I’m noticing you are using your opinion interchangeably with facts, And by the way something to keep in mind is there are many living languages today that do use pictographs. Is there a reason why that language, Some of which are literally used by billions of people, is invalid because some kid from Wichita Kansas said “Languages should not use pictures?”
And this is a subject with practical real world ramifications. There has been research projects that have gone into deciding how to label our radioactive waste, You know the ones that remain toxic for up to few hundred thousand years. And pictographic languages have one thing of merit in this context. There is far far less shift in the meaning of their words over the centuries then for our alphabet based languages.
Not at all, but please don’t be pretending that pictures and pictographs are ‘words’ in the traditional sense (yes, they are a valid form of language, but it is a form that is seen as an alternative to using words, not a form that’s one and the same). Now they might describe something, yes, but it’s a different type of description.
I don’t think that’s particularly applicable because the mechanic is not literally saying that the engine is talking, but is personifying the engine by saying that it does something that humans do. So he’s not modifying the word “talk”, but modifying whatever it is the engine is doing. But I see your point.
