Indeed: Words have their way.

So, about this last class (28th Oct. 2011 ;P), we further examined the importance of the mix of words and images or symbols in order to convey an idea or show a situation to a person (inform). So, we began the lesson examining a small comic strip and we were asked to interpret what the images were trying to say (by the way, there were no words included in the comic strip). My partner (Isidro) and me came up with this sentence for it:

"A war has broken out somewhere in an African village and the villagers are being attacked by invading troops."

After writing this and sharing our sentence with all the other pairs, we found out that we all had slightly different outlooks on what was going on in the image. Some of us said that people were being killed, others that it was in the middle of the savannah, others said that the soldiers were coming to help them, and even one pair described the emotional aspects of the image. However, when we were shown the comic with the panels in different order, we found out that it could get a completely different meaning (In this case, the troops were coming to help the villagers from some previous attack or disaster they had...who knows really?).

Following this, we had to pick a question from one subject (Biology, Chemistry or Physics) and answer it with scientific terms. In my case I had to describe what light is:

"Light is a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. it is composed of three different colours - red, green and blue - all which combine to make white visible light. Light can be reflected, refracted, scattered and absorbed by different components and objects that it finds on its path. It travels with wavelenghts and its speed is of 3x10^18 ms-1." (A whole mouthful of scientific terminology.)

After this we were asked to list words that came up to our mind when hearing the word "light".

Life, creation, day, hapiness, hope, warmth, blinded, strong, powerful, invigorating, ect. 

This, from what i have learnt previously in my English lessons - is called a denotation. A denotation is when a word is described for what it means in a very precise and often scientific way. For example: 

"The Moon is the Earth's only natural satellite. Its distance is three times Earth's diameter and it moves around the Earth as this one spins around its axis around the Sun - hence enabling different faces of the moon to be visible at different stages of the month." (Another mouthful)

However, if you were to describe the moon or a word with a connotation, then the description would be totally different:

The moon holds a ghostly silver woman, perched upon a sea of blackness and stars, its faces gradually unveiling themselves for the human eye to admire (that was quite... bad :( )

So the point about a connotation is that ideas of emotions and relations to the word are brought up to describe it rather than describing it with the exact definition of it. This is why such language it commonly used in poems and novels that try to use literary devices such as similies and metaphors to convey a idea or feeling on the work (the advanteages of English A1 xD)

For me this lesson was really intresting as one can interpret an image in a million ways, but at the same time words can also have the same attribute as they may have a lot of different ways of seeing them depending on the person.