Denotation & Connotation

An Analogy Using the Study of Genetics

In genetics, your genotype is what your genes actually say. Your phenotype is what you look like. For example, you can have brown eyes, but still carry the gene for blue eyes. Your genotype may be mixed, but your appearance is not.

Here is a Punnett Square of two brown-eyed parents who both carry the gene for blue eyes. Because blue eyes are recessive, if you carry the gene for brown eyes, you have brown eyes. That’s true, even if you also carry the gene for blue eyes.

Everyone gets one gene from their mother and one from their father. If these two people had children, the odds are that 1 in 4 of their children would carry two brown eyed genes, 1 in 4 would carry two blue eyed genes, and 2 in 4 would carry one brown and one blue, just like the parents.

Three of the children would have brown eyes, yet that wouldn’t tell the full story. What your genes say isn’t always what your genes express. You can’t tell by looking at a brown-eyed person what their genes say.

Words are like this, too. They have a genotype – what we call the denotation. It’s what the dictionary says the word means.

And they also have a phenotype, what we call the connotation. It’s what the word looks like and feels like when its used.

So, something could actually be one thing, but look like something else.

Denotation/Connotation