Jessica’s example involves the new word, “lol,” which just happens to also be a symbol for drowning:<\/p>\n
She writes:<\/p>\n This is a great example of the social construction of language and thus, the social construction of our reality. We, as a society, have agreed that “lol” has a meaning separate from itself and the overall accepted meaning of this symbol is laughter, as opposed to the original intended meaning of a person drowning. While this is a simplistic and comical example, it clarifies the results of differences between intended meaning and interpreted meaning, as well as indicating the importance of social construction of language and society as a whole.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jessica B. sent in an excellent example of the way that symbols evolve.\u00a0 Language is just a set of symbols.\u00a0 The squiggles and lines that make up “cat” don’t look anything like a cat, but English speakers will know what it refers to. And language, of course, evolves and sometimes that evolution has odd and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23384,293,23622],"class_list":["post-24710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-social-construction","tag-social-construction-symbols"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24710"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59996,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24710\/revisions\/59996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2010\/06\/65813_drowncallcopslaugh.jpg\")
<\/a>(source<\/a>)<\/p>\n