Not to sound pompous, but doesn't all this have to do with Kenneth
Burke's ideas about "terministic screens" in some blurry kind of way?
If we partly identify ourselves by the vocabulary we use, then maybe
these words have some kind of value--to us as professionals, as
scholars, as humans trying to figure out what the heck we're doing
anyway.
Granted, those words become "popularized" (guffaw) and sometimes lose
their meanings--or the original sense of their meanings--but they
were, once, a way for us to identify and maybe delineate our field.
Or were they?
Not only did you make sense, Julie, you touched a chord in me.
Denise Dilworth
Madonna University
Livonia, MI