Connotation 2.0
“There are no such things as synonyms! he practically shouted. Deluge is not the same as flood.”
-Tom Robbins
“But we use synonyms every day,” you might say. I told my friend I was going to the grocery store.
She said, “Oh good, because we’re out of milk. Can you get some when you go to the supermarket?”
Obviously, grocery store and supermarket are different words with the same meaning, and therefore
synonyms.
But what if I said I was going to the grocery store, and he asked me to get a vacuum cleaner? Sure,
some stores also sell cleaning products and hardware—but there are some grocery stores that only sell
food items. “I can’t, get a vacuum at a grocery store,” I say. “Only food.”
A grocery store is then: a store where one can buy food items, and sometimes, or even often, larger
one also sell other items. Whereas a supermarket is: a store that sells groceries, cleaning and hardwaretype items, and maybe electronics, and other things too. We mostly use them interchangeable, but you
see how in a certain context, they may be different.
A thesaurus will tell us that “glide” is a synonym of “skate”. If I say someone skates on the ice, or
glides on the ice, they paint a different picture for the reader: glide implies a more artful, beautiful act.
Someone could skate clumsily on the ice, but it is doubtful they’d be described as gliding if they were
clumsy.
Consider this example:
People
Humans
Homo Sapiens
We might use any of these words, depending on what we are saying and to who we are saying it. But
do they mean the same thing in every context? Afterall, humans are people, and people are Homo
Sapiens.
If I say, “Be yourself. Don’t listen to what people tell you to do,” it sounds like I’m saying you, as a
person, shouldn’t listen to other people and give into peer pressure.
If I say, “Be yourself. Don’t listen to what humans tell you to do,” it sounds the same, expect we
don’t usually refer to ourselves as “humans” in an informal context, and so it implies an unfamiliarity
and “othering”. A talking bear in a movie might say this to another animal.
If I say, “Be yourself. Don’t listen to what Homo Sapiens tell you to do,” it sounds extremely
scientific. It implies the speaker no only doesn’t associate themselves with people, but also views them
from an analytic, scientific context.
If I was writing a story, and wanted to foreshadow that one characters that looked human was actually
some other creature, but the other character doesn't know yet (for ultimate in dramatic irony) I could
have the character say, “Be yourself. Don’t listen to what humans tell you to do.” Maybe your reader
won’t notice it right away, but their brain will...
See for yourself:
1. Choose a word and write any sentence with it.
Example:
Word: eat
Sentence: In Jonathon Swift’s A Modest Proposal, he satirically said we should eat the babies of the
poor, but I think we should eat the rich.
2. Now think of FIVE synonyms for it. Write the same sentence, but replace your original word for
each synonym.
Example:
synonyms: consume, devour, dine on, snack, graze
sentence: In Jonathon Swift’s A Modest Proposal, he satirically said we should snack on the babies of
the poor, but I think we should snack on the rich.
3. Write a sentence explaining how/if the sentence has a different connotation with the synonym than
the original word.
I added “on” to make the sentence grammatically correct, and “snack on” is more playful, less
common, and implies a smaller amount than “eat”.
If your word truly doesn’t have five synonyms, then you can choose two words and six sentences to
create your five sentences.