Denotation & Connotation

This past week we spent some time working in our Lit Circles, reading our books and finding connections with evil and darkness, which is what we've been working with for a couple of months now. That, however, was not all we've learned. We have also worked with denotation and connotation, seeing not only the meanings of these words but also comparing examples and coming to our own conclusions. In order to remember what denotation means, you can observe that it starts with a "d", same letter that starts the word dictionary. So the denotation of a word is its actual meaning, the description we could find for the word in an official dictionary. The connotation leaves part of the reason behind and is the meaning for the word that you can find in between the lines, it's what the word brings to us when we read it in a context, based in our culture and emotions. One example could be the word "Blood". Its denotation is: "the red liquid that is sent around the body by the heart, and carries oxygen and important substances to organs and tissue, and removes waste products" (By Cambridge Dictionary: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/blood_1). But when we look at this same word, it may also bring us a sense of danger, pain, and violence that is not contained in the "official" description, but we were taught to know because of our experiences and reflections.