Connotative Meaning Of Health Essay

It is possible for a person to be both healthy and unhealthy at the same time. This paradigm is possible because of the different types of contexts that health is used with. So, what factors influence the different types of meaning that people associate with health? The meaning of health changes based on whether the connotative or denotative meaning is used and what schema is/are associated with it. In order to understand what the definition of health is, the meaning of denotation must be understood. Denotation is the reference of a word; it is the formal definition of a word (Allan). The denotative meaning of health, according to Merriam-Webster is “the condition of being well or free from disease”. This denotative term is often used in a

Connotation is the specific person or person’s attitude toward the word (Allan). So a healthcare worker might use the connotative meaning of the word health when taking to a person that has had a disease for most of his/her life. The reason for this is because even though he/she might not be healthy in the denotative meaning he/she is healthy according to his/her regular standards. The term can also be altered when taking about items that attribute to a healthy lifestyle. For example, red meat is a healthy option for a person who is anemic, but red meat is very bad for someone’s health if he/she has high cholesterol. Other factors that might place a person into a healthy or unhealthy category is society. An example of this is a person with no arm past the elbow. Society might think that this person has an abnormality which would categorize him into an unhealthy category when really the reason for the partial limb loss was a home accident and in reality, the person is very healthy. This shows that health cannot be accurately determined in a denotative meaning without knowing someone’s full history. Most of the time, people determine their healthy by using a connotative meaning. There is no one connotative meaning to the word health because the term changes based on everyone’s thoughts and feelings toward the