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Snudging cheapskates and magnificent profusion : the conceptual baggage of ‘mean’ and ‘generous’
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Mooney, Annabelle and Sifaki, Evi (2017) Snudging cheapskates and magnificent profusion : the conceptual baggage of ‘mean’ and ‘generous’. In: The Language of Money and Debt : A Multidisciplinary Approach. Palgrave Macmillan Cham, pp. 105-135. ISBN 9783319575674
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57568-1_5
Abstract
The way people behave with money communicates a great deal about their character. In this chapter, we examine the ‘conceptual baggage’ (McConnell-Ginet, Language, 84(3), 497–527, 2008) for synonyms of ‘mean’ and ‘generous’. Drawing data from The Historical Thesaurus, we show that generosity is connected to positive assessments across a range of fields, including appearance, morality and space, while meanness is similarly widely disparaged. Drawing out the ideological connections between the lexical items and their cultural baggage, we argue that ‘wealth’ operates as a synonym for goodness, while ‘poverty’ functions as a synonym of badness. In order to challenge this, we suggest that attention be paid to ‘relative generosity’ and demonstrate how results from data analysis can be used to critically assess the prevailing economic orthodoxy.
Item Type: | Book Item | ||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Centre for Applied Linguistics | ||||
Publisher: | Palgrave Macmillan Cham | ||||
ISBN: | 9783319575674 | ||||
Book Title: | The Language of Money and Debt : A Multidisciplinary Approach | ||||
Official Date: | 14 July 2017 | ||||
Dates: |
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Page Range: | pp. 105-135 | ||||
DOI: | 10.1007/978-3-319-57568-1_5 | ||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||
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