Indexicality.
Next (and final) semester, I’ll be doing a linguistics course towards a minor in Cognitive Science (they didn’t offer a Major but I’m ok with a minor for it just on principal). Language and Culture.
I’m peeking ahead in the textbook to see what areas will give me trouble and I found one right in the first chapter: Indexicality. It’s one of those concepts I think I know and then I forget but since it’s a big part of this course, I’ll need to really ‘get’ it’.
This guy gave a great 2 minute definition of indexicality. I can see now why it would always give me trouble; one of my cognitive flaws is difficulty with “what was the author intent?” or that something else was meant than what was said. It even shows up in standardized tests throughout my childhood hiding under the category of “listening comprehension”; my scores were as good as wildly guessing, because I was. Of course as an adult, I’d learned to work around it and manage; it takes a lot of extra effort but it’s learnable in day-to-day life. But here, it looks like I’ll be “facing the beast” head on with this concept of Indexicality – and all of these implicit meanings that are stuck onto words and phrases invisibly I’m going to have to get special glasses on to see them for the 16 weeks of the course. Should be interesting. Hopefully I can master this concept ‘enough’ that when I work with it in the class, I’ll have a process/procedure I can follow that will help me work with it, to “see’ a mechanics of the implicit so I can keep up and not be stuck in the starting gate.