Hey there! Welcome to my first ever post on this platform!
Have you ever wondered at the absurd ways in which we use language?
If we stop and think about the words we say, we find that it is far less straight-forward than imagined thanks to the wealth of strange metaphors and allusions embedded in our language. Not to mention the breadth of cultural roots like fossils, which impress upon our imagination great wars, migrations, and trade of the past.
It's the nature of language that we learn the semantics of our own language - its' etymology, grammar and other underlying structures, long after we have already learnt to speak the language.
In this sense, the field of linguistics bears uncanny resemblance to the field of science.
A child first learns to interact with the world. They gain only an unconscious intuition of the laws that govern it through motivated play. Dopamine circuits emerge to engage patterns of interaction that reliably result in a desirable outcome via a process of trial and error achieved through massive amounts of repetition. Only after this intuitive stage of understanding does the child begin to examine the building blocks and governing rules of the universe they have been interacting with all along.
If science is an abstract representation of the external world, then the inner world is abstractly represented through linguistics. The linguistic landscape, just as the scientific, is vastly unexplored; both are undergoing a parallel rise into human consciousness. We are hardly aware of either. We are to a great extent unconscious of what we say and equally unconscious of the world we live in.
This post will introduce a short series of posts that explore how the word 'fuck' is used, and hence extrapolate what it MEANS to us. If the word 'FUCK' is not being used outside the bounds of its formal definition, how exactly is it being used? How is our definition of 'fuck' expanded by these associations?
My approach won't be strictly linguistic (I'm no linguist<:), but I hope that this article and those that will follow will be interesting and thought provoking.
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(note: strong pedagogical influences here from Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, most famous for 'the stages of development', a study of developmental psychology)