[Xmca-l] Re: anachronism

Mon Sep 17 00:43:06 PDT 2018

  yes, Mike, and "wild" seems  to be missing too
Anne-Nelly

Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont
University of Neuchâtel

Le 17 sept. 2018 à 00:37, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu<mailto:mcole@ucsd.edu>> a écrit :

Interesting that the list of opposites of culture does not include the word, nature.
mike

On Sun, Sep 16, 2018 at 3:26 PM, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu<mailto:annalisa@unm.edu>> wrote:

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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