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The, A Strange Or Horrible Imaginary Creature

Satisfactory Essays

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” -Toni Morrison. We, as humans, feel the need to label things. That label might be good or it might be bad. Regardless of whether it is good or bad, can it change? Throughout history, words have changed meanings. This happens when cultures meet or when a culture changes. The meaning of a word can even vary from place to place. What about connotations? Can a word still keep it’s meaning if how we perceive that meaning changes? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word monster as, “a strange or horrible imaginary creature.” Today’s definition of monster fails to really capture how we see monsters. In our society, when one hears the words monster, it fails to invoke the same kind …show more content…

Whatever definition is used, whether today’s cartoonish approach or the pagan’s lighter view, it remains far from the classic witch. Both are far less dark, and far less terrible, and far more marketable, than that of the past.
Witches are not the only ones who have had their reputation tarnished for advertising purposes. In today’s culture,the word vampire provokes a very different response than it might have in the past. In Keiley Culbertson’s Evolution of the Vampire, she compares Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight,saying that Dracula is described as, “super creepy looking and a foreboding feeling of evil seemed to permeate his being. Count Dracula is purely wicked with not a drop of humanity. He is a monster who destroys families by feeding upon children in order to satisfy his craving for human blood,” while the vampires in Twilight, “participate in society and are not frightening to the rest of the world as Dracula had been.” This belief is shed by many. The vampires in Twilight were simply lacking in the fear department. They were more humanized than most vampires were in the past. The overwhelmingly positive response that Twilight got inspired both authors and tv producers to take to this new definition of monster. The previous definition of vampires was only sellable to a select few. Twilight was read by most teenage girls and their mothers, along with plenty of

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