Stephanie Chen Pd 5 3/10/2020

Stephanie Chen Pd 5

3/10/2020

Aim: How does language construct thought? 

Today’s Do Now was to write a 6 line poem about falling in love - in Russian. We had 3 minutes to construct one and when it came time to share in groups, it became obvious that many people struggled. The point of this activity was to show how important words are - due to our limited knowledge in Russian (or Italian and Spanish), many of us weren’t able to get our points across as well as if we had written the poem in English. Many people had an idea of what they wanted to say, but didn’t have the words for it so they had to use simple language or had to write about something off prompt (bananas). 

This was then tied to Newspeak, which is the official language in Oceania, the place where the story of 1984 takes place. Newspeak simplified things so you didn’t have a way to explain things, and to show us exactly how, we played a game called Taboo. The rules of this game are pretty simple: you are given a main card and then five other words which you cannot say while trying to explain the main word to other people. The first round of the game was with tangible objects. We had to create our own cards, swap with other people and guess.

My card: 

• Ipad 
• Apple
• Device
• Electronic 
• Games 
• Tablet 

The person explaining my card to other people had described it as “a macbook but downgraded.” 

 The first round was easy because we were using tangible objects; it’s a lot harder to express ideas or philosophies with limited words. That was the second round. Similarly, we created our own cards, but this time we made them not based off of tangible objects. For example, our groups were assigned to the words law, hate, belief, and pride. It was easy to come up with a card, but when groups swapped cards, it became hard. For example, I had to explain integrity, which is having strong morality. I struggled to explain it because most of the taboo words were synonyms and I couldn’t explain any physical characteristics of integrity because there was no such thing. 

 That was the takeaway from today’s lesson. It’s hard to convey thoughts with limited words and this connects back to 1984 because of Newspeak limiting the characters from expressing their own thoughts, seen in Winston’s first diary entry with simple words and multiple grammatical issues. Playing the game taboo today made me realize how important synonyms are and how it’s hard to explain things. The Do Now in particular had me stumped. I couldn’t get all poetic and figurative because I didn’t know how to get fancy and say stuff like “the ocean breeze in her hair was aromatic.” My Russian poem was just a bunch of words thrown together that I knew off the top of my head and most definitely did not talk about falling in love, like most of the class. I’ll use today’s lesson whenever I’m expressing myself so I can appreciate our freedom of speech and also so I can make sure whatever I’m saying makes sense by seeing if someone without context reading my words will understand. 

 Я люблю грибы 

Очень интересны 

Люблю Больше чем моя 

Красивая кошка 

Скажите пожалуйста 

Ты любите это тоже 

Конец!!