The New Yorker, 75th anniversary cartoon collection,

Bob Mankoff, Editor; Pocket Books, New York, 1999.

Recently I’ve noticed that a term "edufication" was used in Internet blogging. That recalls my earlier puzzle on "educa-tion" related to the Croatian meaning of the word. On the subject of upbringing a young person, two terms are used in Croatian, "odgoj" and "obrazovanje", and they are used as a pair, almost as a rule. The first of them, "odgoj", refers to the behavioral and moral upbringing while the other, "obrazovanje" is related primarily to acquiring a bookish knowledge and then some skills.. On the same subject, only term "education" is widely used in English, not coupled with something else. I’ve explained that to myself as "education" embracing both, "odgoj" and "obrazovanje", and being yet another indication of the fact that term "knowledge" in English has a community (social) meaning different from the Croatian equivalent (literal translation) "znanje" because knowledge is valued by its application, not by volume.

I’m aware of the English term "edification", not widely used (by my experience, at least, I encountered it very few times). I would not, however, correlate the term to Croatian "odgoj" because "edification" has only positive connotations (a building up, an uplift, especially in a moral or spiritual sense) while "odgoj" could be bad, inappropriate, inadequate etc. And that is the reason why "edufication" in Internet blogging caught my eye: it was used in a derogatory manner, like reminding someone of his deficient education.

 2008-02-03 

previous