1. Lexicology as a branch of linguistics. Subject matter. Links with other branches. Problems.

Lexicology is a science about words. It studies the vocabulary of the language which consists
of words and word combinations. The subject matter of lexicology is separate words, their
morphological and semantic structure, and the vocabulary of the language, which includes
words, word combinations, their origin, developement and current use.

Lexicology has lots of connections with other branches which also have word as a central
unit. If lexicology studies the meaning of the word, Grammar studies grammatical problems.
Both study roots, morphemes, affixes. But, unlike grammar, lexicological function is to name
objects.Word is the smallest part of the sentence, and the sentence in its turn is the smallest
communicative unit. Also it lexicology has connections with Phoenetics. If we change the
stress, we change the meaning of the word and even part of the speech: rEcord – recOrd,
cOment – comEnt; blackboard – black board, blackbird – black bird. Also it has some links
with Stylistics. One of the problems of lexicology is stylistic characteristics. Stylistics studies
different stylistic styles. The reflection of the style is in the text. E.g. bookish style we often
can find in classical fiction or textbooks; collocations – in speech. And the last connection is
with Social Lingusitics (Cultural Studies): language is a part of the culture, it’s a reflection of
the mentality of people. There are some specific word combinations and associations in
every language. E.g. professions: kindness is associated with social workers.

General lexicology studies general rules of lexicology, irrespectively of other more specific
problems. Special lexicology studies one specific language, description of its vocabulary,
vocabulary units, the main units of the language. But every special lexiclology is based on
principles of general lexicology, a general theory of vocabulary.

Historical lexicology studies the development of the words (vocabulary) – Diachronic

approach. Modern lexicology (descriptive) studies the words and their development at the
given stage – Synchronic approach. Dia – through, syn – together, chronos – tome.
Contrastive (comparative) lexicology compares mother tongue with other languages.

2. Main branches of lexicology

The present course concentrates on the following aspects of English lexicology:

1) Semasiology or semantics, including the semantic classification of English words;

2) The study of word-structure and word-formation;

3) The study of word-equivalents, or idioms and phraseological units;

4) A brief etymological survey of the English word-stock;

5) Fundamentals of English lexicography.

Let us now take each of these subjects in more detail.

1) Semasiology is the branch of lexicology devoted to the study of meaning. Its name comes
from the Greek "semantikos" which means "significant". In English-speaking countries, this
field of linguistic study is also known as semantics which is less precise, since the word
"semantics" may also be used as a synonym for "meaning" – we can, for example, speak of
the "semantics of a word". Semasiology may use both the synchronic and diachronic
approaches to the study of meaning. In the first case, it studies types of meaning found in
present-day English, providing a classification of English words according to their meaning; in
the second case, it deals with changes that the meanings of words undergo in the course of
the development of the language.

Semasiology is closely connected with another branch of linguistics, onomasiology (from the
Greek "onoma" – "name"), which also studies meaning but from, as it were, the direction
opposite to semasiology. While semasiology proceeds from the word to its meaning,
onomasiology proceeds from the object of naming to its name, i.e. it studies the ways in
which things are named in a language. (Another name for onomasiology, much used by
Soviet linguists in the recent past, is the "theory of nomination".) Proper names – i.e. names
of people, geographical names – are studied by the branch of onomasiology called
onomastics. Both onomasiology and onomastics are highly specialized branches of lexicology
and therefore outside the scope of the present course.

2) Word-structure and word-formation in English are studied by a branch of lexicology

known as word-building, which studies both the formation of new words and the structure
of the existing ones. Word building investigates: how new words are formed; how they are
related to the existing ones; what material they are made of (including the typical word-
production patterns and components, as well as a study of their productivity).
There’s no unity of opinion among linguists whether word-building should be considered
under lexicology or grammar (as morphology), since in many cases it is the syntactic
properties of the words, not their structure, that determine their functioning in the
language. In Chinese, for example, it is very hard to tell a word from a morpheme, as Chinese
is an analytical language. In English, which also has analytic tendencies, a word may start
functioning as a different part of speech without any apparent changes in its morphological
structure, by changing its syntactical distribution alone. This is known as conversion and will
be discussed in detail later.

3) Word-equivalents in English, i.e. units of language that seem to consist of several words
but function as an inseparable unity, are studied by a branch of lexicology called
phraseology. To these belong idioms, set expressions, phraseological unities and other
traditional units in the vocabulary. The meaning of such a unit is not usually the sum of the
meanings of its parts; thus a white elephant need not be either white or an elephant, but is
anything hard to keep and harder to get rid of. Neither is a red herring a fish or red, but is
something used to deceive, or distract attention from what is really important. For obvious
reasons, this aspect of the language gets less attention from native linguists than from
foreign learners. Phraseology studies the classification of phraseological units, their
structure, origin and use in the language.

4) The origin and history of words in English is studied by a branch of lexicology called
etymology (from the Greek "etymon", meaning "the truth"). Originally it set forth to
determine the "true" or "original" meanings of words, uncorrupted by later use. At present it
mainly deals with motivations of words, tracing their use back to the earliest known forma
and meanings. Etymology may be thus compared to archaeology: both try to reconstruct the
past by its surviving fragments. Apart from that, etymology investigates borrowing of words
(source language, method of borrowing, relation to native words, etc.). The approach it uses
is of necessity diachronic.

5) Lexicography (from the Greek "lexicon", meaning "a dictionary", and "grapho" – "to
write") is perhaps the most important branch of applied lexicology, dealing with the theory
and practice of compiling dictionaries. It studies, among other things, the classification of
dictionaries, their structure and general principles of dictionary-making.

3. Morphology (Gr. morphe – form, and logos – word) is a branch of grammar that concerns
itself with the internal structure of words and peculiarities of their grammatical categories
and their semantics.
The study of Modern English morphology consists of four main items,

(1) general study of morphemes and types of word-form derivation,

(2) the system of parts of speech,

(3) the study of each separate part of speech, the grammatical categories connected with it,
and its syntactical functions.

The morpheme may be defined as an elementary meaningful segmental component of the

word. It is built up by phonemes and is indivisible into smaller segments as regards its
significative function.

Example:

writers can be divided into three morphemes

Morphological structure of the word

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2.1. Morphology: definition. The notion of morpheme.

Morphology (Gr. morphe – form, and logos – word) is a branch of grammar that concerns
itself with the internal structure of words and peculiarities of their grammatical categories
and their semantics.

The study of Modern English morphology consists of four main items,

(1) general study of morphemes and types of word-form derivation,

(2) the system of parts of speech,

(3) the study of each separate part of speech, the grammatical categories connected with it,
and its syntactical functions.

The morpheme may be defined as an elementary meaningful segmental component of the

word. It is built up by phonemes and is indivisible into smaller segments as regards its
significative function.

Example:

writers can be divided into three morphemes:

(1) writ-, expressing the basic lexical meaning of the word,

(2) -er-, expressing the idea of agent performing the action indicated by the root of the verb,

(3) -s, indicating number, that is, showing that more than one person of the type indicated is
meant.

Two or more morphemes may sound the same but be basically different, that is, they may
be homonyms. Thus the -er morpheme indicating the doer of an action as in writer has a
homonym — the morpheme -er denoting the comparative degree of adjectives and adverbs,
as in longer.

There may be zero morphemes, that is, the absence of a morpheme may indicate a certain
meaning. Thus, if we compare the words book and books, both derived from the stem book-,
we may say that while books is characterised by the –s morpheme indicating a plural form,
book is characterised by the zero morpheme indicating a singular form.

Traditional classification of morphemes is based on the two basic criteria:

1) positional – the location of the marginal morphemes (периферийные морфемы) in

relation to the centralones (центральные морфемы)

2) semantic/functional – the correlative contribution (соотносительный вклад) of the

morphemes to the general meaning of the word.

According to this classification, morphemes are divided into:

1) root-morphemes (roots) – express the concrete, ‘material’ (насыщенная конкретным

содержанием, вещественная) part of the meaning of the word.

The roots of notional words are classical lexical morphemes.

2) affixal morphemes (affixes) –express the specificational (спецификационная) part of the

meaning of the word.

This specification can have lexico-semantic (лексическая) and grammatico-semantic

(грамматическая) character.

The affixal morphemes include:

1) prefixes

2) suffixes
Prefixes and lexical suffixes have word-building functions, and form the stem of the word
together with the root.

3) inflexions (флексия)/grammatical suffix (Blokh)

The morpheme serves to derive a grammatical form; it has no lexical meaning of its own and
expresses different morphological categories.

The abstract complete morphemic model of the common English word is the following:
prefix + root + lexical suffix + inflection/grammatical suffix.

4. In linguistics (particularly morphology and lexicology), word formation refers to the ways
in which new words are made on the basis of other words or morphemes. Also called
derivational morphology.

Word-formation can denote either a state or a process, and it can be viewed either
diachronically (through different periods in history) or synchronically (at one particular
period in time). See examples and observations below.

In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, David Crystal writes about word
formations:

"Most English vocabulary arises by making new lexemes out of old ones — either by adding
an affix to previously existing forms, altering their word class, or combining them to produce
compounds. These processes of construction are of interest to grammarians as well as
lexicologists. ... but the importance of word-formation to the development of the lexicon is
second to none. ... After all, almost any lexeme, whether Anglo-Saxon or foreign, can be
given an affix, change its word class, or help make a compound. Alongside the Anglo-Saxon
root in kingly, for example, we have the French root in royally and the Latin root in regally.
There is no elitism here. The processes of affixation, conversion, and compounding are all
great levelers."

(David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge
University Press, 2003)

Noun + noun
Examples are: master-piece, table-cloth, maid-servant, bread-winner, shoe-maker etc.

Noun + gerund

Examples are: wool-gathering, snake-charming, bull-baiting, sooth-saying etc.

Noun + adjective

Examples are: court-martial, knight-errant

Gerund + noun

Examples are: piping-hot, walking-stick, drawing-room, laughing-stock, skipping-rope etc.

Adverb + noun

Examples are: out-patient, over-load, fore-sight, under-tone, in-sight etc.

Verb + noun

Examples are: dare-devil, cut-throat, break-fast, spend-thrift, pass-port etc.

Adjective + noun

Examples are: short-hand, free-thinker, lay-man, hard-ware, strong-hold etc.

Present participle + noun

Examples are: humming-bird, flying-fish, loving-kindness etc.

Pronoun + noun

Examples are: he-goat

Possessive noun + noun (In this case, the apostrophe is usually omitted)

Examples are: sportsman, craftsman, statesman, hair’s-breadth, stone’s-throw

Language play occurs when people manipulate the forms and functions

of language as a source of fun for themselves and/or for the people they

are with. Everyone, regardless of cognitive level, plays with language

or responds to language play. The responses range from the primitive

pleasure experienced by severely mentally handicapped children when

they hear dramatically contrasting tones of voice (in such interactive

games as 'peep-bo') to the cerebral bliss experienced by highly sophisticated connoisseurs as

they explore the patterns of sound-play in, for

example, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Between these extremes, there

are the hundreds of books, with titles such as 1000 Jokes for Kids, which

are packed full of linguistically-based exchanges, most involving wordplay. Over half the
game shows on radio and television are language

based, involving various kinds of word-guessing, the manipulation of letters, or deviant

forms of monologue and dialogue. There are dozens

of word games recorded in Augarde (1984), for example, ranging from

the familiar crossword puzzle and Scrabble to linguistic pastimes which

are bizarre in the extreme.

Some professions rely greatly on verbal play. Newspaper sub-editors

all over the English-speaking world devise headlines with great ingenuity. Advertising
agencies make their living by it. It is widely present

in informal conversation, such as the use of mock regional tones of

voice when telling a funny story ('There was this Irishman .. .') or the

twisting of each other's words to score or make a silly point, as in the

repartee which followed the arrival of someone whose arm was in plaster, in which various
participants said such things as No 'arm in it, Got

to hand it to you, Put my finger on it, did /1 (Chiaro, 1992: 115). Language play may even
make use of nonsense, too, as in the case of scat

singing and, at a literary level, in such creations as Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky' or the crazy
verbal concoctions of Ogden Nash. The whole

field is reviewed in Crystal (1995: 404,ff.).

Language play in children

We all know that language play is at the core of early parent-child

interaction. We see it in the distinctive linguistic behaviour which

characterizes much parental speech to babies - such features as higher

and wider pitch range, marked lip rounding, rhythmical vocalizations,

tongue clicking, mock threats, and simple, repetitive sentence patterns

(Snow, 1986). We see it in the words and rhythms of the songs parents

sing - their lullabies and nursery rhymes. We see it in the early play

routines parents use, in which considerable pleasure is taken by all participants in

developing a dynamic language that complements the patterns

of visual and tactile contact. Nuzzling and tickling routines, finger-walking, peeping
sequences, bouncing games, build-and-bash games, and

many other interactions are not carried on in silence: on the contrary,

they are accompanied by highly marked forms of utterance (which

people, incidentally, are often quite embarrassed to hear later out of

context). Given the remarkable emphasis placed upon language play in

child-directed speech during the first months of life, one would expect

it to be a central element in subsequent language development, and to

play an important part in such domains as language therapy and the

teaching of reading.

Stages of development

There seem to be several stages in the development of language play.

Phonetic play seems to be the first step, from around age 1. Children

have been recorded in which long sequences of vocal modulation occur,

with no one else around, which have been interpreted as a primitive

form of vocal play (Garvey, 1977). Vocalizations accompanying motor

activities become noticeable between 1 and 2 - melodic strings of syllables, humming,

chanting, singing. Symbolic noises increase, and

sounds are brought in to represent actions, such as noises to represent

ambulances, police cars, telephones, motor horns, and things falling

down, and these may be lexicalized (ding ling, pow pow, beep beep).

Children, often in pairs, begin to 'talk funny', deviating from normal

articulation: everyone in the group talks in a squeaky or gruff way, for

example, and the sounds themselves seem to be the main focus of the

play (a contrast with the adoption of special tones of voice in games of

pretend role play, later).

Phonetic play is followed by more structured phonological play, from

around age 1 introducing prosodic variations, producing language-specific, conversation-like

utterance which is often referred to as 'jargon'

(Crystal, 1986). From around age 2, variations are introduced into syllable structure, using
reduplication, sound swapping, and the addition

of pause within a word. Bryant and Bradley affirm: 'the two-and-a-halfyear-old child
recognize[s] rhyme and produce[s] rhyming sentences

with ease: she also changes the very form of words which she knows

to suit the rules of rhyme' (1985: 48). Garvey reports one girl of 3;0

who spent nearly 15 minutes engaged in taking apart and varying the

syllabic structure of the word yesterday - the versions being mostly

whispered in a soliloquy as she played with various objects in the room.

This kind of play is typically a solitary behaviour, often heard in presleep monologues, as
reported in detail by Weir (1962).

Within a year, these monologues can become very complex. They

may be spoken alone or to an audience. An example from Clare, nearly

3: 'There was a little girl called May ... and she had some dollies ...

and the weeds were growing in the ground ... and they made a little

nest out of sticks ... for another little birdie up in the trees and they

climbed up in the trees ... and they climbed up the tree and the

weeds were growing in the ground .. .' This is not communicative language: the tone of voice
is sing-song, meditative, and there is no logic

to the sequence of ideas. It is associative freedom, recall for its own

sake, with repetition of favourite strings ('the weeds were growing in the ground' is repeated
three more times in the next 10 clauses). It is a

primitive poetry. Such speech may be dialogic in form, but the one child

performs both parts in the dialogue. If there are other children in the

room, they tend to ignore such vocalizations, not treating them as communicative. Sharing
of language play seems to follow later. (An exception is the twin situation, where the twins
do play with each other's

vocalizations, as seen in the report on the Keenan twins (Keenan, 1974).)

Between 3 and 4, children start using each other's play language as

a trigger for further variations. They may add rhymes: A says Go up

high, B says High in the sky. They may alter initial sounds, sometimes

to make real words, sometimes nonsense words: in one of Garvey's

examples, A says Mother mear (laugh), mother smear, then I said

mother smear mother near mother tear mother dear, B responds with

peer and A adds fear (1977: 37). Bryant and Brad1ey report several

examples of rhyme-play by 3- and 4-year-01d children (1985: 47), such

as The red house/Made of strouss, I'm a flamingo/Look at my wingo,

and use this as evidence to support their hypothesis about the importance

of rhyming and reading ability. By 5, this dialogue play can be very

sophisticated. There might also be morphological play, an ending being

added to various nouns: teddy leads to fishy, snakey, and others. Here

is another Garvey example, this time between children aged 5;2 and 5;7:

Humour is the focus of scholarly studies conducted from philosophical, psychological,

sociological, anthropological and linguistic perspectives. While researchers working within

the first four fields may regard humour as one (albeit multifarious) phenomenon, linguists

analysing its semantic, cognitive, sociolinguistic or pragmatic mechanisms must necessarily

narrow down the scope of their investigation to its particular manifestations, which are

many.

Verbal humour which is of interest to linguists and is thus addressed here stands vis-a`-vis

non-verbal humour emerging from, for instance, pictures or body language (cf. Norrick

2004a). Verbal humour is understood as that produced by means of language or text.

The JOKE is commonly considered the prototypical form of verbal humour, produced orally
in conversations3 or published in collections. Even if the concept is by no

means unfamiliar to lay language users, who intuitively grasp its meaning, it does pose

definitional problems. Most frequently, this humour category is defined in terms of its
constituent parts. According to the widely acknowledged definition, a joke comprises a

build-up and a punch (Hockett 1972 ⁄ 1977). Similarly, Sherzer (1985:216) defines a joke as

‘a discourse unit consisting of two parts, the set up and the punch line’. The set-up is

normally built of a narrative or⁄and a dialogue (Attardo and Chabanne 1992), while the

punchline (see, e.g. Attardo 1994, 2001) is the final portion of the text, which engenders

surprise and leads to incongruity with the set-up (Suls 1972). There are a number of ways

in which this incongruity emerges and is resolved (cf. Ritchie 2004;4 Dynel 2009). In the

example below, the punchline reveals information that sheds new light on the situation
presented in the set-up.

(1) A man is eating a stew at a restaurant. Suddenly he feels something sharp in his

mouth. The object turns out to be an earring. The man instantly starts rebuking the

waiter, who says, ‘I’m terribly sorry but you can’t imagine how happy the chef will

be to get it back. It’s over three weeks since she lost it’.5

There are also a few subtypes of jokes different from the canonical canned joke that are

often treated as distinct categories, i.e. shaggy-dog stories (lengthy stories without
punchlines) (Chiaro 1992), riddles (questions followed by unpredictable and silly answers)

(Chiaro 1992; Dienhart 1999) or one-liners (one-line jokes with punchlines reduced to a

few words) (Chiaro 1992; Norrick 1993).

(2) Ghandi walked barefoot everywhere, to the point that his feet became quite thick

and hard. Even when he wasn’t on a hunger strike, he did not eat much and became

quite thin and frail. He also was quite a spiritual person. Furthermore, due to his

diet, he ended up with very bad breath. He became known as a super-calloused

fragile mystic plagued with halitosis. (http://www.heggen.net/entertainment/shaggy_

dogs/Gandhi.htm)

(a shaggy-dog story)

(3) A. What do you do to catch a squirrel?

(B. No idea…)

A: Jump up a tree and act like a nut. (http://www.jokes.com)

(a riddle)

(4) I don’t approve of political jokes ... I’ve seen too many of them get elected.

(http://www.getamused.com/joke)

(a one-liner)

One-liners, although generally considered to be canned jokes, are also conceived as being

very similar to witticisms (described later in this article), because they may be contextually

prompted and normally do not interfere with the development of the conversational

interchange as do full-fledged jokes.

The shortest humorous chunks are lexemes and phrasemes (cf. Mel’cˇuk 1995, 1998), i.e.

lexical units used in discourse for a humorous effect, whose semantic import is usually

germane to the whole utterance, often non-humorous as such. The humorous potential

of lexemes and phrasemes resides in their novelty, unprecedented juxtapositions

(incongruity) of their constituents and the new semantic meaning they carry. Even if
borrowed

from popular media discourse, they are widely repeated in appropriate conversational

contexts, they are unlikely to be officially conventionalised and listed in dictionaries as

lexical items, and thus always retaining the quality of exceptionality. The two humorous

categories, lexemes and phrasemes, deserve meticulous attention, as they do not appear to

have been widely discussed in humour literature (but see Chiaro 1992; Alexander 1997;

Nilsen and Nilsen 1978).

4.1 LEXEMES

Most humorous lexemes can be conceptualised as neologisms. Those are new words
indispensable for naming new inventions and discoveries. However, speakers will also
incorporate new words in their idiolects, the sole reason being the novelty of expression and

humour. Humorous neologisms capitalise on various word-formation processes.

a. coining – creating new morphemes

(5) pupkus – the moist residue left on a window after a dog presses its nose to it

(6) a narfistic – an idea or concept that is very difficult to express

b. derivation – adding prefixes and suffixes creatively, albeit in conformity to general

derivation rules

(7) reuglification – the process of becoming ugly again, e.g. when washing off make-up

(8) a kitchennaut – a person working in a kitchen

(derivation with the bound meaningful morpheme –naut)

c. compounding – combining words

(9) a Monday-morning idea – a silly idea one has early in the morning, after a weekend spent
partying

(10) a whistle number – an impressive number

PHRASEMES
Semantic phrasemes (Mel’cˇuk 1995, 1998)7 manifesting humorous potential are
characterised by novelty and capitalise on the surprising juxtapositions of their subordinate

elements.

(19) a behemoth of a paper – a paper which scares with its quality

(20) the warmth of a meat locker – emotional coldness

A different category of phraseme, standing vis-a`-vis the one exemplified above, comprises

already existing units whose conventionalised meanings are substituted with new ones. As

rightly observed by an anonymous reviewer, a peculiar subtype of this category will be

rhyming slang, e.g. ‘the trouble and strife’ for ‘wife’.

(21) donors of organs – people on mopeds on a highway

(22) a geriatric ward – a group of elderly people sitting together

(23) a beast of burden – a person or thing causing distress

Lexemes and phrasemes are the shortest possible humorous chunks, which may participate

in longer humorous utterances or interchanges described below.

5 Witticisms

A witticism, also referred to as a wisecrack, a quip8

or an epigram,

9 is a clever and

humorous textual unit interwoven into a conversational exchange, not necessarily of

humorous nature (cf. Norrick 1984, 1986, 1993, 2003). Witticisms are context-bound,

but occur spontaneously, usually in non-humorous conversational environment, in

contrast to canned jokes, which constitute integral parts per se, dissociated from the

whole discourse (Long and Graesser 1988). Witticisms are thus similar to non-humorous
sayings or proverbs in the sense that they are communicative entities comprehensible even
in isolation, but they are usually produced relevantly to (recurrent)

conversational contexts (e.g. a conversation on a given topic, such as politics; or upon

somebody’s coming late). A regards their form, witticisms resemble one-liners. However, in
contrast to one-liners which, as are longer jokes, are produced within a

humorous frame and rarely communicate meanings outside it (but see Oring 2003),
witticisms overtly convey meanings besides facilitating humour. Additionally, witticisms

are inherently clever, while one-line jokes need not be so (e.g. bordering on the

absurd, rather than witty observations) (see Dynel 2009). Witticisms may assume various
communicative forms, such as definitions or comments (Chiaro 1992) and serve

communicative purposes besides engendering humour.

6. Words can be inspiring and leave room for our imagination. Words are easy to recall,
bring clarity, trigger new ideas and – most important of all – are personal. They are the way
we think. They shape our thoughts and help to understand our own ideas and those of
others.

Utilising words in a creative way will help to make your ideas more vivid. They help us to
understand & explain our ideas and are a great way to engage people with complex themes.

It goes without saying that you should always try to stay away from jargon, unnecessary
abstraction or corporate bullshit bingo. You have to be creative when you are explaining an
idea or when you’re naming a project.

The same rules from the advertising industry apply in your business. A great name or slogan
for your idea can help it to become memorizable. See it as the branding of your own ideas. If
you give an interesting and original name to your idea, it’s likely that people will feel excited
to help you realise it.

Give Your Idea A Title

People will identify more with your idea if they have a name or sentence to relate to. A title
also helps to make it easy to talk about specific ideas. You can mention an idea without
having to explain it (all over again) in detail.

Explain Your Idea In One Sentence

I know, this can be tricky. Sometimes an idea, project or situation is simply too complex to
break it down to a single catchy oneliner. Yet in this high speed world where everybody has
a low attention span, it can be a smart move to make your project more iconic. A creative
slogan or tagline is also important for others that need to sell or pitch your ideas.
Oneliners are not just for advertising agencies and politicians. They are for IDEA PEOPLE. If
you create a oneliner for your idea, you grab someone’s attention. Once you have their
attention you have plenty of time to explain your idea in detail.

Watch Out For False Interpretations

Always check with your audience if they understand what you mean. If you don’t want to get
into trouble it’s advisable to ask your audience to explain your idea in their own words. This
way you can make sure they really get it. Apart from the interpretation of certain words,
there is something else you have to take into account. Perception. It can happen that people
like or dislike your idea for other reasons than you might expect. To different people words
can mean very different things. Words are never neutral.

Play With Ambiguity

In Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) there is a term called “artfully vague” and it means
using vague language with a purpose, to give people the freedom to give their own meaning
to words. It has to do with hypnosis and our conscious and subconscious mind. Words are
personal as I stated in the paragraph above. Sometimes it can be useful to stay vague about
certain elements of your idea. If you allow people to create their own versions of your idea
it’s much more likely that they will embrace it. People need the feeling that they can still
contribute. It’s advisable to lose ownership of your idea as soon as possible. Rather make
sure that everybody owns a piece of the idea. In the end people work the hardest for their
“own ideas”.