It has become a stigma in our culture that being manly is repressing your emotions; therefore enduring a strong bite in your alcohol is the physical representation of enduring life. This refined taste is usually associated with an older man, one that has been through the trials and tribulations of life. It has become a sign in our culture that with age comes sophistication and it is the same with whiskey. Whiskey can be seen as synonymous with that of an older man. Culture and age are what make whiskey and men who they are. Whiskey that is perceived as classy has been through and extensive aging process and if the developers take as much time to make a 'perfect' product you as a consumer should take the time to enjoy it as it was made. As you can notice polysemy comes into effect. Polysemy is considered, "the result of both compositional operations in the [lexica] semantics, such as coercion and co-composition, and of contextual effects, such as the structure of rhetorical relations in discourse and pragmatic constraints on co-reference", or in more simplistic terms a sign that has multiple meanings (Willems 238). Through the eyes of a heterosexual male growing up in the south, drinking your whiskey straight has become almost as a rite of passage. My family once coerced me into drinking "snake bite" (whiskey neat) out of a flask while I was a boy hunting. My grandfather told me that if I wanted to warm up and put some hair on my chest I should take a swig from his flask. As a prepubescent boy it was hard to make myself do it, although, when I summed up the strength to swallow the harsh liquid I immediately felt older and more knowledgeable. These meanings are from the diegesis of my observation. The essay "Pursuing the Meaning of Meaning" explains packaging in the advertising world perfectly, "the marketer seeks to construct an image of the intended consumers and to shape their motivational and behavioral responses to the product" (Mick et al 14-15). These techniques have worked to anchor the meaning I associate whiskey with. They have created a culture through advertising that strengthens and reaffirms what ideals have been created through my own experience. It is not clear that advertising alcohol has a direct effect on consumption however, "changing attitudes towards drinking, personal preference shifts in brand choice or the creative appeals used by the brands, may no doubt have had an impact on consumption of these brands" (Wilcox, Kacy, Schulz 830).