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Word Significance, Word Choice, and Title Meaning

© Karen Powers Liebhaber

In October, I showed you the meaning of "Not Your Problem." However, meaning is often determined by the words used by the author. The question you should remember is "why did the author chose the words that he did?" During this discussion, keep one thing in mind: each word is selected for a specific reason.

Denotation and Connotation

While there are several words that are crucial to the meaning of the poem, we are only going to focus on one. Before we start talking about it, though, let me tell you that many words have two meanings: the denotation and the connotation.

The denotation is the dictionary definition of a word. It is the meaning of the word as you would look it up in the dictionary. For example, from Webster's College Dictionary (New York: Random House, 1991) the word children, or rather child since the dictionary sends me to child, is:

1. "a young by or girl
2. a son or daughter
3. a baby or infant
4. a person who behaves in a childish manner
5. a descendant
6. any person or thing regarded as the product of particular circumstance or influences"

Pretty much what we expected from the dictionary, right? However, in "Not Your Problem," the word children refers to much more. In this poem, the connotation of the word is much more important than the denotation of the word.

The connotation of a word is the meaning derived from the context of the work or the meaning attached to a word beyond that of the dictionary. Society can add connotative meaning to a word. A group of people can add connotative meaning to a word. A poem can add connotative meaning to a word.

In "Not Your Problem," the connotation of the word children is "the hope for the future, our future leaders, the group of people who are supposed to have better than we have." Let's look at how this word is used in the poem.

Stanza 4 focuses on the children. Remembering the importance of the child, as explained in the paragraph above, look at this stanza:

"Here our children will never learn to read or write; their teeth will rot from their heads' they will join the army, or die like us beneath foreign bombs." (8-12)

The narrator is telling us that the way things are going where he is; the children, the hope of the future, will be in as bad of shape as the narrator's generation. The children will have as little to be happy with as he has. Education will never be an option, only brute force, pain, and death.

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