This weeks symposium wasn’t as structured as the previous ones this semester but hey, it’s the week after mid semester break and we all know and understand just how easily one week can throw you off! Admittedly, as a result of this I found that this symposium was one that I struggled to connect with. However I did find the content Adrian discussed regarding language particularly intriguing due to the way in which he approached this subject, a way in which I have not come across before whereby rather than simply blurting out the ordinary, ‘a word is a word because it has a valid and deliberate descriptive meaning’, but rather taking the approach that a word scan only mean something by what it is not. In other words, a word holds its individual meaning by virtue of the relations of the words that could have been used but have not. It is then because of the this that words create a panoply, otherwise known as language.

Yet what intrigues me about the subject of language even further is it’s amorphous nature, the way in which it can so easily be changed through culture, memories and experiences, and most relevantly, technology. Without the rise of texting and the original constrictive limitation of words per text, would abbreviations such as ‘lol and ‘soz’ have been created that are now so widely known and accepted? Yes, these examples are abbreviations but that does’t defer from the fact that these are still a form of language that is more commonly being used off the medium of the technology and in verbal conversation.