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Showing posts with label meanings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meanings. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Crafting Corner—Meanings


Who doesn’t love Princess Bride? The Romance. The Action. The Humor.

Here’s a gem:
Vizzini: He didn’t fall? INCONCIEVABLE!
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Here is another gem I learned from my writing conference:
When choosing your words be aware of their connotation and denotation.

Denotation: Dictionary definition of a word.
Connotation: Emotional associations of a word.

In an editing class I took we talked about this, and how important it is to choose words that truly say what they want them to say.

I’ll give you an example from my own MS:

“Zven is a hard man, I want to know how hard.”

I big thanks to Cassie and her dirty mind for convincing me to change hard to cruel :) LOL!

This is something I’d never thought to look for, but it is so true. You can’t just hit the thesaurus when you need a new word for walked, because march means something different than stroll, and stride and roam are actually opposites.

What about you? Are you aware of the secondary meanings of words? What was your worst blunder?

-Angie

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