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Connotative language adds impact to an argument by stirring emotions or by painting a visual picture. Let’s look at how Jay Griffiths uses connotative language to set the stage for an argument about privacy rights. This excerpt is from Griffiths’s essay “The Tips of Your Fingers,” which appeared in a 2010 issue of the magazine Orion:
In the woods near the border checkpoint from France to Britain, several people sit around a fire, pushing iron bars deeper into the flames until the metal is red hot. Taking out the iron, with searing pain they burn their own fingertips, trying to erase their identification.
The fingertips are a border checkpoint of the human body, and through them the self reaches out to touch the world. Fingertips are diviners, lovers, poets of the perhaps, emissaries of empathy. They are feelingful, exquisitely sensitive to metal, dough, moss or splinter. They are also one of the body’s places of greatest idiosyncrasy: a fingerprint is the body’s signature.
The language draws readers in. We’re at the border checkpoint, we see the flames and the “red hot” metal, and we feel the “searing pain.” Even the description of what a fingertip is—