Word of the Day: Anthropomorphic

Anthropomorphic
- adj.

Pronunciation:
[an-thruh-puh-MOR-fik]

Definition:
1. ascribing human form or attributes to a being or thing not human, especially to a deity.
2. resembling or made to resemble a human form: an anthropomorphic carving.

Etymology:
1827, with -ic, from anthropomorphous (1753), Anglicization of L.L. anthropomorphus "having human form," from Gk. anthropomorphos, from anthropos "human being" (see anthropo-) + morphe "form" (see morphine). Originally in reference to regarding God or gods as having human form and human characteristics; of animals and other things from 1858; the sect of the Antropomorfites is mentioned in English from mid-15c.

Quote with the word:
"Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it."
-Albert Einstein from "The World as I See it."

I tend to anthropomorphize everything around me. For I know every rock and tree and creature has a life, has a spirit, has a name.

"I tend to anthropomorphize everything around me. For I know every rock and tree and creature has a life, has a spirit, has a name."

So, why would you want to denigrate the rocks, the trees, and the animals by ascribing human characteristics to them?

So, I take it that anthropomorphize and personify are the same? I feel my third grade English teacher cheated me on this. Why use short words when the longer ones are so appealing...?

Sibby, I challenge you to fit "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from Mulan into a post. That would be extraordinary.

Great word. I was hearing it a lot in my Anthropology of Religions class.

"Why use short words when the longer ones are so appealing...?"

That's an interesting question. It's because sociolinguistically, large words like "anthropomorphize" are less appealing to people as a whole. More learned people tend to adhere to larger more "intelligent" sounding words. The word personify is simpler, more accessible and seems less pretentious, lending itself to colloquial speech. :)

So when speaking to a professor, you'd probably prefer to say "anthropomorphize". Speaking to a friend at a bar in your friend-to-friend speech you might prefer "personify" unless you're trying to impress or connect with them intelligently.

I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel just to have that type of long winded/worded conversation. It seems more and more words fall out of use all the time, not to mention the constant shortening of words and terms to the point of "lol" being used in face to face conversation. It's quite strange, actually.

Ya srsly lol.

Not strange at all. Languages naturally progress toward simplicity. You see it all the time! It may be disconcerting for the enthusiast of colorful language, but not strange. To be honest, though, English has the largest vocabulary of any language in the world so I don't know why you'd ever think that! :D

Words only fall out of use if the speaker lets them.

If I've been reading Jane Austen for a long time, I find that my "thought language" patterns start to mirror the way they talk. Like, I wouldn't start talking all Edwardian, but if I were to sit down and write fresh out of reading Northanger Abbey, I would not be surprised at all to see some similarities of style.

I'm sure we'd pick up pretty easily on those more complex patterns of speech if we had social groups where we were exposed to them more. (Failing that, thought-speaking in a British accent seems to help it come more naturally.. ; ) )

In my work, I'm always told not to anthropomorphise science too much. Lightning doesn't "choose" the path of least resistance. Negative charges don't "like" positive charges. Hot air doesn't "want" to rise.

Blaaaaah.

Aww Abby that must be hard for a poet like you. Lololol.

"Languages naturally progress toward simplicity"

^ are you sure? Doesn't language, like anything pointed toward progress (ie science), aims towards credibility and specifics?

Concerning English language: See, for example, the word LOVE. All the way back before the medieval period, the debate was either you love a person or you don't. Now we've split the word into divisions calling them "Like", "Infatuation", "Romantic friendship", etc... A person infatuated today may be in love, in the less-strict use of the word, back then, and a person in love back then may just be infatuated with the person if you consider the terms now.

I don't know if natural language is aimed at anything so structured as progress... if anything, I'd think it settles into the groove of "ease of use." Scientific language is more intentional, so it's helpful to direct it towards specifics. But everyday language is something we wield without even thinking about it.

Agree. But aren't we creatures with the innate principle of curiousity? In this case, we tend to have this subconscious goal of understanding things. And how more can we understand things by talking about them, communicating about them, and here words are very much the significant tool.

If we talk about even the simplest topic (which Socrates states, isn't simple at all), like Justice. We must make sure we agree of its definition before even starting to converse, or else, it wouldn't matter if we agree or disagree at the end of the conversation, if the same defintion is not accepted/understood.

Imagine a world where the question asked is not "Shall we go for a walk down the street" but "Shall we go for a shuffle along the sidewalk"...
I would very much like to live there.

^ nice. That's why if ever I fall in love, it would be with a poet. XD

Something I read a couple of days ago... (glad to have typed it)

Jonathan Foer, What We Say We Are: I once read an esay by a linguist about the continued creation of modern Hebrew. Until the mid-1970's, he wrote, there wasn't a word for frustrated. And so until the mid-seventies, no Hebrew speaker experienced frustration. Should his wife turn to him in the car and ask why he'd fallen so quiet, he would search his incomplete dictionary of emotions and say, "I'm upset." Or, "I'm annoyed." Or, "I'm irritated.-- This might have been, itself, merely frustrating, were it not for the problem of our words being self-fulfilling prophecies: we become what we say we are. The man in the car says he is upset, annoyed, or irritated and becomes upset, annoyed, or irritated.

^^ Nice.

"are you sure? Doesn't language, like anything pointed toward progress (ie science), aims towards credibility and specifics?"

Oh, for sure! Don't mistake the word simplicity here. What I mean is that historically speaking (at least in the Indo-European language family) languages tend to weed out seemingly useless or cumbersome constructions with ease-of-speech in mind. Hence why in most languages that used to have case inflection it either no longer exists or has become simplified.