Author Archives: ip4973

Taming a wild tongue is a difficult and arduous task. Holding back one’s tongue is sometimes the hardest thing to do especially in a country where free speech and expression are encouraged. So, how can you tame a wild tongue? Train it to be quiet and lie down when not needed? Such a task requires training and discipline. At its heart, a tongue that is truly wild can never be fully tamed but it can be trained to stay down and only stay up when asked to. The process can be done just as one would tame a wild animal. Discipline when the unwanted action appears and rewards when the correct response is indicated. Operant conditioning with positive reinforcement and negative punishment is the only way to control one of the most uncontrolled organs of the body. With time, patience, and rigorous training, an uncontrolled tongue can be controlled and taught how to speak the way one wants and at the time one wants. With force and mindless training, a wild tongue can be trained but it will never truly lose its wildness. A wild tongue is a part of a whole that belongs to an argumentative, assertive person who some may call an advocate. Though the tongue can ultimately be tamed, the heart cannot. 

Wild Woman: She was considered a wild woman for her time. Staying out late and paving her own path was more unknown for women of the 1900s. 

Wild Man: He was a wild man living out in a cabin all alone with just his beer and an ax. 

Wild Animal: Wild animals can often be found in their natural habitat if you stay quiet and don’t alert them of your presence. 

Wild Beast: His dog was a wild beast. The dog was known to bite people left and right and was prone to aggressive behavior. 

WIld Thing: There was one wild thing about her. She loved to howl like a wolf. 

Oscar Wilde is a very popular and well-known literary figure from the Victoria era whose writing and reputation still stand until this day. He was a poet, author, and playwright and graduated from Oxford University. His writing belongs to the late Victorian era of England. Some of his notable works were The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Sphinx, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde was often characterized as a dramatist with satire in his plays. He was also a huge proponent of the aestheticism movement which was met by a lot of criticism in terms of his works. 

In terms of reception, Oscar Wilde had some very popular works but they were considered controversial at the time because of their lack of morality and focus on aestheticism. Today, Wilde’s work is deeply appreciated by literary fans and he is also known for his wild personal life where he engaged in extramarital affairs with other men and went to jail due to his homosexuality. 

Oscar’s Wilde’s personality and life were most definitely a little wild and I do think that this is reflected in his work as an author as well! Though not everyone would describe his work as “wild”, I think there are many themes of “wildness” throughout his works. Wilde uses a lot of ideas of emotional turbulence and turmoil in his work. These are especially seen in one of his most famous poems, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. This opening was written after Wilde was released from jail and is a poem of his experiences with themes of betrayal, emotional despair, and emotional turbulence. In this poem, Wilde also talks about the death of love. He says “Each man kills the thing he loves…..the brave man with a sword”. I think Wilde’s work would be considered wild because it reflects on the emotions and thoughts behind a wild and non-conventional life for his time period. 

When comparing and contrasting Hemingway’s The Good Lion and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are there are some similar and different meanings of “wildness”. The Good Lion features a lion with wings who traveled to Africa and lives with the other wild lions there. He describes them as “bad” lions because they eat meat and humans and have an animalistic and carnal way of behavior. He sees himself good lion because he does not eat humans and has more polished behavior than the other lions. Hemingways describes the bad lions as, “..[roaring] with laughter and [eating] another Hindu trader and their wives would drink his blood, going lap, lap, lap with their big tongues”. In this particular paragraph of the piece, Hemingway describes the wild in the eating styles of the bad lions and shows the carnal desire of hunger and for food coming out in the behavior of the animals. By describing the movement of the animal’s body parts, he shows how desperate they are for food, in turn showcasing the “wild animal” inside of them. Maurice Sendak showcases the “wild” in a similar way by showing a story about a boy who takes a magical sort of journey to a place where a lot of wild things are. He is crowned king of the wild kings but gives up his throne when he smells dinner coming from his room. When he first reaches the land of the wild he describes the creatures there who were, “[roaring] their terrible roars and [gnashing] their terrible teeth’. Similar to the Good Lion, Sendak shows the wild and scary side to the animals by describing their physical characteristics and actions. By describing their teeth and sounds, he showcases the wild as untamed and scary. There is also a similar theme of the carnal desire of hunger and how that plays into wildness shown by how the boy leaves the wild animals because he smells good food. 

The Wizard of Oz is a popular classic novel written and published in 1900. It features a young girl who gets stuck in a tornado that takes her to the land of Oz. In Oz, the girl gains several friends and companions in her adventure. The communicator of this novel is the author of the book, L. Frank Baum. Baum is best known as a popular author for children’s books at this time. I believe that the audience of this book can be a number of people. At the surface level, the story is appealing to children as the main character is a child and features many themes (magics) and characters (witches and wizards) that are common in children’s stories. Though the story may seem childish, the deeper recurring themes and allegorical significance of the Wizard of Oz make it a story for adults. The story features many themes about the state of American politics at the time which could only truly be understood by an adult. 

A passage in the novel that contains the word “wild” in it is at the beginning of Chapter 6 when The Cowardly Lion is introduced into the story. The word is used when Dorthy, Toto, and the Tinman are walking through the woods and she hears the sound of a wild animal in the bushes. This sound scares Dorthy and she describes her heart racing and her fear for Toto, her dog as she walks through the words. In this passage, wild means something animalistic and dangerous is there. This is further exemplified by describing Dorthy’s emotional reaction to the sound and appealing to the reader’s pathos. 

A song that I think is wild is “Wildest Dreams” by Taylor Swift. This is a pop song written and released by Taylor Swift in 2014. The song was featured in “1989” which was Taylor Swift’s fifth studio album. The song “Wildest Dreams” is about a perfect relationship that is doomed to end. During the whole song, the singer sings about her perfect and passionate relationship but is torn because she knows it will end soon. The relationship features a perfect man in terms of appearance and character and is filled with passion and excitement. This is why she tells her partner to remember her in their “wildest dreams”. She asks that her partner remembers their amazing memories and how beautiful she was. The music video takes place in Africa and features many wild animals. The song is wild mostly because it focuses on something so perfect it is almost unrealistic. The singer tells her partner to remember her in his “wildest dreams” because of how crazy, passionate and exciting the relationship was. The bridge of this song also features the wild and passionate love, “You see me in hindsight, tangled up in you all night, burning it down”. Lyrics such as these emphasize the passion in the relationship and how the relationship should be remembered by making it almost “wild” and “animalistic”. The music video features wild animals and takes place in a setting that is associated with the wild to help reinforce the central theme of this song around the wild. 

Gymnastics is defined by exercises that require a lot of physical coordination, flexibility, and strength! For women’s gymnastics, the players/communicators are typically young women (usually under the age of 35-40). The audience usually consists of spectators who are watching a performance for their own pleasure (as seen at the Olympics or gymnastics competitions). Gymnastics usually speaks to athletes, gymnasts themselves, and people who enjoy watching the sport! The sport is also more popular among women and girls. In terms of the gymnasts, there are definitely a higher proportion of female gymnasts over male gymnasts. Gymnastics doesn’t have traditional rules like a sports game would have. Instead, gymnasts are scored based on the accuracy, precision, and difficulty of their floor routines. The ultimate performance is determined by the gymnast’s ability to execute their routine with the highest quality and precision! Since gymnastics is such a female-dominated field, I feel like the grounds upon what determines a good gymnastics performance also conform to the patriarchal concept of a “good woman”. The gymnasts are supposed to conform to their routine and execute a delicate and perfect routine that doesn’t differ from the planned choreography. In my opinion, female gymnastics routines also have a very feminine aspect to the choreography. They also include delicate and feminine dance steps which really show the overlap between playing sports and playing gender in gymnastics. In the video that I included, you can see the careful and delicate dance steps that Simone Biles takes in her routine! In my opinion, gymnastics is not very wild because it stays to a carefully planned routine and doesn’t involve a lot of unplanned events or improvision. The routine does not include any sudden or violent movements and instead focuses on precision, agility, and planned movements. 

A movie I consider “wild” is Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa. This movie was made in 2008 and was directed by Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath. The movie features Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, and more! The movie is about zoo animals that were accidentally transported to Madagascar at the end of the first movie and the movie focuses on how they try to escape from Madagascar and end up in Africa. Some themes in this movie are adventures, friendship, and the wild! I think this movie is “wild” because it involves putting animals that were in the zoo and part of human society into the wild where they are from! The movie focuses a lot on the differences between wild and zoo animals and how the zoo animals eventually start accepting their inner animal in their natural habitat. 

A scene from this movie that shows the wilderness is when one of the zoo animals, the lion named “Alex” finds his lion tribe and family in Africa. According to the lineage of the tribe, he ends up being the next successor or leader of the trial and has to fight the other competitor for the spot to become the leader of the lion tribe. Whoever dominates over the other is chosen as the new leader for the trial. Alex has never fought another lion in his life because he is a zoo animal, so he is very taken aback and confused by the ritual. This ritual is usually a way wild animals assert their dominance over one another especially in territorial and leadership disputes. This specific scene emphasizes the wildness of the film because this event is very new and different for a zoo animal that doesn’t understand wild and undomesticated ways. The struggle that Alex faces with this tough battle emphasizes the dichotomy between animals in captivity and animals in nature and how there are different customs in the wild. 

Film Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLVjIhPYq7s

The word wild can have various different connotations and denotations. The first definition that appears in most dictionaries such as the Cambridge Dictionary and Merriam Webster refers to the word “wild” as a way to describe something that is violent and without control or restraint. This definition of the word seeks to emphasize wild as something that is not tame and how the word wild is used to describe something that has a lot of energy and emotion and may be considered something far from normal. The dictionaries also define wild as a way to describe something that is non-human or more animalistic. This definition takes a more specific view into the first definition and ties the wild to animals and nature. Overall, the definitions from the dictionary focus on defining wild as something that is very uncontrollable and something that can be further connected to the wilderness and nature! 

When I hear the word wild, I think about something or someone that has no control and their actions are marked by an overcome of emotion or passion. For me, wild can be synonymous with crazy with some slight differences between the two! I think that the word “wild” really emphasizes the animalistic side and can be used to describe an action that brings out the inner animal in a human. In my opinion, this word “wild” does not have a negative connotation and can be used to describe things that are just crazy, full of energy, and almost carnal-minded. This definition of the word “wild” helps me to describe and understand the animal instinctual side of humans!