Today’s focus on big words connected in my mind. Before class started, we were each expected to come with our own compilation of big words. My list looked something like this: environment, sustainability, nature, wilderness, conservative, liberal, progressive, feminism. The idea behind each of these being to follow the three main components of what makes a big word a “big word”. These three things to keep in mind break down into conceptual scope and that which is subsumed about the word, cultural resonance and the meaning of the word throughout cultures, and finally practical significance and how the word applies to reality.
In environmental theory, the interdisciplinary nature of the environmental studies results in huge lists of big words from a number of different areas of study that are all related in some way to how the environment is studied. Environment in and of its self is a word so big I don’t really know what to do with it! From reading Jim’s manifesto of theory, we talked about the ways that environmental theory uses inclusivity and coherence to organize big words in a way that makes sense.
This became even more evident to me when we make a class list of all the big words that we individually came up with. While my list hovered around eight or nine words, our collective words looked more like this: development, healthy, nutrients, protect, God, clean, pure, renewable, nature, environment, diversity, natural, wild, wilderness, built, sustainability, green, performance, ritual, preservation, preserve, conservation, anthropocene, love, society, liberal, progressivism, freedom, culture, ethical, aesthetics, politics, government, policy, regulation, technology, science, studies, conservative, security, communism.
Looking at a white board filled with big words made it hard to really comprehend what exactly they were for and how to understand them. Using the rules, so to speak, that I mentioned above, helped me to understand why these words or ideas were big. More importantly, by the end of class I felt like I could talk about big words without being overwhelmed by their existence and use.