A pair of words I picked that have the same denotation, but different expressive meanings are “smile” and “smirk”. Smile automatically gives off a positive denotation. For example, if you use smile in a sentence such as, “He gave me a smile yesterday”, to smile is something we generally view as a positive action. Now, if we saw it somewhat differently from a positive action, that smile could have potentially been more than just a regular smile, it could of been a smirk. A smirk is a negative denotation. Smirk automatically gives of this evil, sneaky, villain type of description of a smile. Therefore, based off of how we might perceive it, we could of either said “He smiled at me yesterday.” (a positive action of how we saw the approach) or “He smirked at me yesterday.” (a negative action of how we saw the approach). Nobody would say he smiled at me and assume it was a negative thing without bringing in a negative adjective along with the action, for example, “He gave me an evil smile yesterday” which only then changes the whole perspective of that action and therefore it becomes negative. So instead of doing that, we can easily use the negative denotation of the word “smile” which can technically be “smirk”.

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