PCed out...But digging the frames

Reading through Lakoff's war of language has proved to be a dynamic experience thus far. There are moments when I'm rolling right along with her, linking the concepts she discusses with my own life and the society I'm surrounded by. Then, without a bit of warning, I'm sliding to a stop as Lakoff goes so deeply into the ins and outs of particular topics that I find my thoughts wandering, my eyes sneaking to the window and my entire focus shifing out of the book completely.

But lets look at the good first. Frames and their connection with the human perception and expectation of reality is one of the most facinating concepts I've come across in college. So much of how people think is based on what they've been taught to expect from certain situations, to the extent that we base our realities off of those perceptions. When I first came to college I had this frame in mind that had been formed through college brochures full of studious twenty-somethings and rolling, green campuses with historical buildings. I associated college with learning, meeting people, taking out loans to pay for it and then scoring a job afterward to cover the debts. It was at first difficult to see things any other way when I began my freshman year, but eventually it hit me that the reason I wasn't crazy about college was simply because it wasn't in sync with the idealistic reality I'd created it to be in my head. This is a powerful thing, the concept of framing ideas and concepts.

Also enjoyable was the discussion of language and control. Some say language is changing, losing its propriety and this is a bad thing because language should be within our control when the rest of the rapidly changing world is not.

Lakoff began to lose me, however, when she introduced the topic of PC. At first it was all well and great, yes! so what exactly does PC mean anyway? But then she went on for pages, and pages, and then I lost track of the pages because I honestly stopped caring.

So it hasn't all been a pleasant journey, but wholly informative regardless, what else was I expecting anyway?