/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17887049]

I have this problem where I don’t understand the meaning of the words I read

[Anonymous No.17887082]

are you reading things that you are not interested in or perhaps only think you ought to be interested in when you're truly not?

[Anonymous No.17887100]

>>17887082
No. I read a word and I think “what is the meaning of this word?”, then I try to define it but realize I can’t. Even if I know the word, I don’t know its meaning. I never know it

[Anonymous No.17887110]

>>17887100
Are you a shade meant to walk the night in perpetuity?

[Anonymous No.17887139]

Illiteracy. Words fit into a fabric of thought. Good readers use words to follow the fabric. The words themselves become secondary to the manifold of thought. After you read enough, you can basically breeze trough texts because you know the type of fabric the author is constructing with his words. You just concentrate here and there to adjust the model of the manifold in your mind.

Read more and it will get better. Don't worry about the words. Try to reach beyond the words and into the meaning.

[Anonymous No.17887143]

>>17887110
I think I’m ephemeral

>>17887139
You humiliated me

[Anonymous No.17887148]

>>17887139
T. Pseud of the highest order

[Anonymous No.17887160]

Read a thesaurus?

[Anonymous No.17887163]

>>17887143
if you are ephemeral then you must will yourself back into the world of the living. patrick swayze practiced flicking coins in ghost, i would start there.

[Anonymous No.17887237]

>>17887139

You are close, but not quite there, but close. You are not wrong, but not quite right. I can't explain it in a lit thread but it is refreshing to see that some at least some are going to be able to get it, unlike >>17887148 who is always going to be too stupid to ever know he is too stupid.

[Anonymous No.17887302]

>>17887148
Not an argument.

[Anonymous No.17887308]

are you sure you're reading in the correct language?

[Anonymous No.17887329]

>>17887237
Not an argument

[Anonymous No.17887811]

>>17887100
I've had similar experiences. We often encounter a word and get an emotional sense of it but not a literal, technical sense. So we know it was used as an insult, or used as a metaphor for something else, but we don't actually know what it means.

For example, if you say "he was hoist with his own petard", you know that means, he sort of fell into his own trap, or he was undone by his own weapon, etc, but you might not know what a petard is.

[Anonymous No.17887832]

>>17887049
dyslexia

[Anonymous No.17887865]

Dictionary

[Anonymous No.17887876]

>>17887148
Yeah, choosing to go with fabric/manifold, rather than fabric/warp/weft. Shows he didn't even understand the scifi's sources.

[Anonymous No.17887930]

>>17887082
Me in philosophy lole

[Anonymous No.17888062]

>>17887100
This "problem" has two forms.
1) Illiteracy. This is the basic form and the solution to it is easy. Read more. Learn more words. Get used to them. If you read enough, eventually you learn their meaning through repeat encounters, context and looking up their definitions. As you are on a literature board, I highly doubt this is the kind of problem from which you suffer.
2) The realization that language is inherently broken and doesn't do what we always uncritically assumed it did. This is the problem philosophers of language, especially in the continental tradition, stumbled upon in the early 20th century (Wittgenstein, Heidegger etc.), though it was not until Derrida in the mid 20th century that the problem was formulated in the way it is most often disscussed today.
You always thought words were a kind of magical force, with their own internal substance and essences. You always thought they referred to concrete things. Then one day you realize words only really refer to other words; language has no solid, metaphysical ground; it is slippery and playful and inconsistent, and the moment you try to take a word and nail it down to the operating table, vivisect it, and pull out its meaning, you find nothing concrete or tangible inside, no essence, no meaning at all. You start reading a single sentence over and over again, trying to derive its ultimate sense and referents. After a few passes the sentence becomes nonsensical. Funny letters on a page, correlated with funny ape grunts when spoken aloud. But no single, clear and distinct meaning. It could mean anything. Anything it could mean. Mean anything it could. Mean like angry? Mean like stingy? Mean like small-spirited? Mean like average? Mean like significance? What does it mean if a man is mean? You could meander through the many possibilities until you found the meanest possible meaning for "mean"; but still you would be left with no certainty about the "true meaning" of the word "mean" in the original sentence. It could have meant any of the other meanings of "mean" I mentioned, or ones I didn't mention.

[Anonymous No.17888065]

>>17888062
>cntd
If you get fall into this solipsistic vortex of linguistic crisis, it can be difficult to escape. That said, it can certainly be done. What you need to do is take a kind of leap of faith into language. You have to acknowledge that sure, it's not perfect. It's not magic. It's not the divine logos, comprising words of power that refer to forms and essences. But it gets the job done. People say things and you understand them well enough. You say things, too, and we understand you. You understand sentences when you read them in the paper, in a novel, perhaps even in poetry. Just believe in language: that it works, that it functions, that though it does not allow me to transport some pure, ideal cognition perfectly from my mind to yours like telepathy might, it nevertheless performs well enough in most cases to get the job done. It's not like we're all running around completely baffled by what other people mean by their words! Embrace the flow of language. Trust in it. Go along for the ride. And when you find words you really and truly don't know, look them up. But don't get bothered about not having a grasp on the "true" meaning of ones you do know.