Language Throughout the Semester (in-class)

As the semester wraps up I've been going through my notes from this semester as a sort of reminder of what we've done, and noticed that one of our early topics was language and how it shapes us. One such note is that language separates us from animals, and shows us our limits. It is our medium between our own thoughts and others, and there is no real way to bypass this. Even with the Helen Keller story we read in class, she wasn't able to fully understand her world (as with the doll or the water) until she had a word for it.

In more relation to this class, I've definitely felt that throughout the various readings and class discussions that I've been able to find new vocabulary and ways to express myself on this topic as the semester continued. Even if I wasn't learning brand new words (like with gestalt), the concepts such as "ecological implications of myth" and "creaturely life" have been expanding the way that I think about the environment around me. Even in the environment of classroom we've all been learning and reshaping our available language together, changing our views of the broader environment through how we are able to discuss it. 

Does anyone else feel the same way, in that as we learned the difference between an icon and an idol we not only saw our old limitations but were able to move forward into a broader view of the world? Maybe it was just that I had never spent a lot of time looking at the social viewpoints of the environment and had focused more on scientific papers and their descriptions, but I did have to learn a lot of new concepts during this semester. 

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