a philosophical and critical movement, starting in the 1960s and especially applied to the study of literature, that questions all traditional assumptions about the ability of language to represent reality and emphasizes that a text has no stable reference or identification because words essentially only refer to other words and therefore a reader must approach a text by eliminating any metaphysical or ethnocentric assumptions through an active role of defining meaning, sometimes by a reliance on new wordconstruction, etymology, puns, and other word play.
Most deconstructiveis always a great word to know.
So is callithumpian. Does it mean:
So is doohickey. Does it mean:
So is interrobang. Does it mean:
a stew of meat, vegetables, potatoes, etc.
a children's mummer's parade, as on the Fourth of July, with prizes for the best costumes.
a children's mummer's parade, as on the Fourth of July, with prizes for the best costumes.
a gadget; dingus; thingumbob.
a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.
a technique of literary analysis that regards meaning as resulting from the differences between words rather than their reference to the things they stand for. Different meanings are discovered by taking apart the structure of the language used and exposing the assumption that words have a fixed reference point beyond themselves