Blog 4

In the first excerpt, Richards refers to how each individual word doesn’t carry a connotation of whether it is good, bad, evil, etc. unless used to form a sentence – a message. Although there is no specific doctrine that can be referred to, it does carry a certain set of beliefs of a particular group, whether personal, political or religious. Word’s don’t have a meaning unless

Still, the wording is somewhat confusing when he writes about doctrine of usage. Even though the doctrine of usage is consists of the right to freely use words in any ways you choose, it diverges from he previous thoughts of the replicating texts and reforming them to make them one’s own. The doctrine of usage doesn’t incite recreating prior texts, but by using one’s own ideas without the any outside influence. Richards is fully against the doctrine of usage because he doesn’t believe that words should only have one meaning, one usage, etc.

            I also don’t understand delegated efficacy. I re-read that a few times, but don’t fully comprehend the definition. However, Richard’s is saying that with “literary context,” previous words can determine how the subsequent ones will be used. This sort of inference makes reading much easier to comprehend.

Richards then talk about Shakespeare and how to understand him by realizing that his words were products of his time. I think this is obvious since everyone struggles with Shakespeare knows that it is difficult.

The idea of remix relates to Richards’ concepts, by introducing that everyone has their own thoughts of one word. (259)