a big little kitchen

A follow-up to Tyler Schnoebelen’s dissertation abstract, which included a section on the use of little in conversation, this find from Megan O’Neil last July:

[from a friend, talking about the rooms in a household] a big little kitchen

meaning not ‘a room that is big for a little kitchen’, but illustrating a shift from an objective, literally diminutive, sense of little to a subjective, affective sense, indicating emotional evaluation (affection, closeness, etc.) — a shift also seen in the use of diminutive affixes in many languages.

 

 

Associations and connotations

[I spent yesterday getting together a handout for my Stanford Sematics Fest paper (today):

Categories and Labels: LGBPPTQQQEIOAAAF2/SGL ...

(abstract here, discussion of the giant initialism here). Here's a section of the handout that pursues a theme from my posting "Labels: homosexual" (here) on associations and connotations of labels. (I will eventually post a link to the whole handout.)]

More synonymy

It occurred to me (during fevered sleep) that it might be worth checking out {“is synonymous with quality”} and similar expressions linking a product or company name with a desirable characteristic. It’s a gold mine.

Word associations as synonymy

From “Disappearing ink: Afghanistan’s sham democracy” by Matthieu Aikins, Harper’s Magazine for January 2011, p. 40:

The Anglicism “democracy,” for many Afghans, has become synonymous with unprecedented corruption, moral decay, and hypocrisy; it is another one of the plagues that the West has brought to this country.

So, for these Afghans, the word democracy has picked up (specific) negative connotations in certain sociocultural contexts. This is bad word association — [bad] [word association] , not [bad word] [association] — in fact, bad word association described by synonymous with in an extended sense.