Send a text that says “fine” and the person on the other end will read anger. Send “fine 🙂” and they will read something closer to what was meant, though nothing about the word has changed. The little yellow face has done more grammatical work in one glyph than an adverb could manage in a sentence, which is a strange thing for a species that spent roughly five thousand years engineering its way out of pictures. …
Joseph Campbell, in The Power of Myth (the Bill Moyers interviews), makes a passing remark about connotation vs denotation that cuts deeper than most full-length treatises on economics or politics. The distinction is simple, but its implications are not. Denotation is what something is — its factual, measurable, dictionary-definition reality. Connotation is what it means — the associations, the emotional weight, the story that clings to it. A rock is a rock. But the Rock of Gibraltar, the Stone of Destiny, the Black Stone of the Kaaba — these carry connotations so heavy they bend the world around them. This is not metaphor. This is the actual engine of human civilization. …