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The meanings of our expressive words are able to vary as our experience and the context of our use of these words vary.
-Living Quality
-Example: Beating (child, heart, rug) |
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Plural-meaning. An expressive word can carry more than one reference. It means more than one thing. Multiple meanings, sometimes meanings quite at odds with one another, can be fused together in one word or phrase.
Example: "Ode to the West Wind" refers simultaneously to a destroying tempest, the Holy Spirit, the power of prophecy and poetry, and life-giving breath. |
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While literal language is conceptually exact, plain speech with clearly-defined edges, expressive language has a soft focus or vagueness; it has associational "fringes" that reach out to connect in some manner to a reality beyond it and make it accessible to us in a way that no literal language can.
Example: EVERY METAPHORE |
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Literal language is bound by the law of non-contradiction: it cannot simultaneously affirm and deny the same thing.
Apparent self-contradiction |
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It can mean things very strongly, or it can mean them quite lightly, through suggestion, innuendo, questioning, or through association with all the different images that come through a word.
Example:"Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?"
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