Last year in George Lakoff's course on Language and the Mind, one of the topics we covered was the contested concept. Briefly, a contested concept is a term which means different things to different people, like 'art,' or 'feminism,' or 'government.'

I've been thinking about contested concepts a bit more lately, specifically in the context of the final paper I wrote for the class, examining ways to scientifically map and cluster people's varying views of these concepts, and seeing how these views relate to demographic, geographic, or even temporal variables.

Yesterday I was thinking about the term 'respect' and I was wondering what your views of the term are. This is just a brief study to see if respect is a good candidate for mapping.

So, if you're bored at work, home, or class, and you're at all interested, I'd love it if you would just jot down a few sentences on what respect means to you, just the essence of the term. I'll summarize the results (no names attached) and post them in a couple days. I'll also post the paper, if anyone's interested, as a real study of the contested concept might be the next step.

So if you're up for it, send your response to me at hello@fury.com. Thanks!