What is inanimate?

What Does inanimate Mean

With etymological origin in the Latin word inanimātus , inanimate is an adjective that refers to what lacks a soul . The term also refers to that which does not show signs of life .

For example: "When the man began to treat the inanimate doll as a person, his relatives began to worry" , "The vehicle was moving at full speed when it ran into an inanimate object that forced the driver to make a sudden maneuver" , "The inanimate being suddenly came to life thanks to the intervention of the fairy . "
Although the inanimate is usually associated with the lack of movement or mobility, the concept is not really linked to the immobile or immovable , but to the lack of anima . This absence of the soul as the principle or essence of life supposes that the inanimate does not belong to the plane of the human.

It is easy to understand the notion of the inanimate from the famous story of Pinocchio . This character created by the Italian writer Carlo Collodi is a wooden puppet: he has neither soul nor life. However, a fairy turned him into a real child from the wish of Geppetto , the man who had made the doll. Pinocchio , in this way, ceases to be inanimate and becomes a human being.
The question of the inanimate motivates all kinds of philosophical, religious and even scientific debates. A sample of the importance of the consensus on the existence or the absence of soul occurs in the gestation. Defining at what moment a group of cells begins to be considered as a human being that already has a soul is key to analyzing abortion , to cite one case.
This term is part of a relatively peculiar group as it is not particularly rare or difficult to understand, but it is not often used in everyday speech either. This is because in an informal conversation we usually adjective those nouns that are not in the focus of our speech but only those that interest us the most and, above all, to express our feelings towards them.
As an example, if we tell a friend that the day before we were in a store and bought a coat, we will probably focus on the latter to describe it with adjectives, since it is the object of our interest, and we will not stop at the characteristics of the building, the neighborhood, the people, etc., as it would happen in a literary narrative. That said, when we talk about a piece of furniture or a rock we do not need to clarify that they are inanimate objects, just as we do not clarify that a person or a dog are not.

In the field of rhetoric , there is a figure called prosopopeia or personification that consists of giving inanimate objects, abstract ideas or animals actions or qualities typical of human beings. This belongs to the group of ontological metaphors (ontology is the philosophical branch that studies the relationships between acts and their subjects, as well as between entities).
A classic example of prosopopoeia is found in the following excerpt from the play Phèdre by the French playwright Jean Racine : "How rigorously, Fate, you persecute me!" . In other cases we can see personified death, nature or the stars, for example. Animals that talk, walk and dress like human beings are also very common in fiction , especially in fiction intended for children, although not exclusively.
It is worth mentioning that in its origins, the concept of prosopopoeia was defined as the attribution of actions to deceased or absent people, as when talking about what our ancestors would do if they were here.

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