[Xmca-l] Re: anachronism

Annalisa Aguilar annalisa@unm.edu
Sun Sep 16 15:26:46 PDT 2018


Hi Andy,


It's always great to discover the hole in a language, which I would call the realization of not having a word for something meaningful.


I looked up "aculture" and the dictionary found "acculture" which is actually to bring someone up to speed in their knowledge of a culture, but I don't think that is what you are looking for.


I found these words when I looked up "what is the opposite of culture":


ignorance
inability
inexperience
uncouthness
bad manners
clumsiness
coarseness
crudeness
harm
hurt
impoliteness
incompetence
inelegance
ineptness
roughness
rudeness
tactlessness

Even though I know that you are not talking about opposites but outside of, what I noticed about this list is the emotionality I associate to many of the words, except maybe for "ignorance," which seems neutral and descriptive, though no one likes to be called ignorant, and that word is best used as a self-descriptor if I'm willing to call myself that.


There is also "clueless" but that is also pejorative.


Maybe "unsophisticated"?


These words below came up when I looked for synonyms for "clueless" and also have a pejorative color:


brainless
childlike
clueless
crude
dumb
feeble-minded
idiotic
ignorant
moronic
naive
slow
stupid
uncomplicated
unschooled
unstudied
untutored
unworldly

"Unworldly" might be OK.

All in all? great observation.

Kind regards,

Annalisa



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