Associationary
A dictionary based on my lived associations with language.
As an applied linguist, ESL instructor, compositionist, and rhetoric scholar, I study not only how we use language but also how language uses us.
The Associationary logo of seemingly random red dots represents the our personal use of words and word patterns we use on a daily basis. They reflect and even shape our linguistic approach to the world as well as our identity. And, using tools and methods from corpus studies, digital text-mining analysis, and discourse analysis, I can discern patterns amidst the seemingly random. How language uses us.
What is harder to see is our distinct, personal, idiosyncratic use of those terms or how we use language.
Hence Associationary.
Association + Dictionary
A dictionary based on my lived associations?
While some might argue that dictionaries create language, they arguably capture language already in use. That said, a dictionary represents a monumental historical human achievement of attention to detail and linguistic prowess, as Samuel Johnson was certainly familiar with, as were any people involved in creating the Oxford English Dictionary (like James Murray or W.C. Minor, or even J.R.R. Tolkien who entered ‘w’ entries into the OED in the 1920s). Then the urban dictionary was created to collect colloquial language that traditional dictionaries don’t immediately recognize or accept.
But, what about our own personal usage of the language? Who is capturing that fundamental dimension of language usage? Associationary will (or will attempt to).
Via Associationary posts, predominantly about English, we will explore the concealed linguistic and experiential diversity perpetually in our presence whenever we interact with people around us. People we think we know so well. We will see how often we ‘lie in a nonmoral [Nietzschean] sense’, and how we can begin today to understand the neglected rich diversity in our homes, neighborhoods, and communities. And, because of new lived experiences and novel associations, the very same words we’ve known all our lives will inevitably take on new definitions, senses, and associations.
Our distinct and vast associations with shared words comprise what I like to think of as our personalized linguistic fingerprint. Such vastness is why word games like Scattergories, Pun Intended, or Listography even hilariously work in the first place.
Upcoming Associationary Entries
While any Luminas reader can (and should!) reply with their own associational entry in response to my Associationary posts, any paid subscriber can also recommend words I should post so you can help direct this informal research effort. Via your contributions, we will build a personalized dictionary and more completely see how language can conceal or reveal the vastness of our human experiences. And, if language divides us, maybe this can give us pause enough to agree with, tolerate, marvel at, or even unify.
A history scholar, Katherine Mohrmann, argues1 that when anticipating what a scholar might find in a community or archive, it is wise to accept that:
what we may find in them is not what we expect, that the materials we encounter have the potential to unravel our narratives, undermine our investments, and wreak havoc on our intellectual stability (155).
So, get ready for your understanding of familiar words to be enriched and unraveled. And join me if you wish by commenting on future posts!
Mohrman, Katherine. “Queering the LDS Archive”. Radical History Review, vol. 122, 2015, pp.
143-159. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2849585.
In what the late Saddam Hussein once dubbed “the great Satan,” roughly two-thirds of the United States enlisted military corps is white . . . The fat, bulbous curry nigger, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin once confirmed in a 93-2 vote of the U.S. Senate, immediately embarked on a whirlwind media tour of duty, telling the pseudo-secular sycophants in the state-controlled tabloid press and state-controlled television talk show circuit about how the U.S. Army is full of bad racist white men.
And now the U.S. Army is doing ads begging for more young white males? What happened?
Even with a full-on declaration of war from Congress, and even if Gavin Newsome could be cheated into the Oval Office by ZOG somehow, with Globohomo diversity brigades going door-to-door looking to impress American children into military service, they will be met with armed, well-trained opposition, the invasion at the Southern border is going full tilt, and the drugs are flowing in like never before . . .
People are done fighting wars for these psychotic kikesucking Zionist ass-whores . . . With the borders of Europe and the USA wide open, civil warfare within the USA, Britain, and most of Europe is a certainty if foreign wars are initiated. Nobody is going to fight a war for Biden, he is dumber than Bush . . . Nobody is going to fight a war for that kikesucking Zionist ass-whore Nikki Haley, and I mean nobody.
Get ready for it . . . the fat old devil worshipping fags on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, in Whitehall, and in Brussels are in no shape to fight a war themselves, and most Americans are armed to the teeth with their own guns . . .
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/satanism-is-a-jewish-cult