Sign, Signifier, Signified

My right arm shoots up mechanically to grab a tight hold of the handle as my dad begins to slowly merge onto the freeway. I know Dad’s a good driver, and I’m not really worried. But it’s an automatic reaction.

The reflection of headlights in my rearview mirror blind me as cars approach, whizzing past us. Mom sits in the back seat of our Camry, trying to explain to me the conversation she had with my little brother on the way home from church.

“Garrett was telling me about his favorite raptor.”
“Uh…do you mean rapture?” my dad suggests. “High school Sunday School is going through Revelations and the End Times.”
“Raptor….rapture…” my mother muses confusedly.
Suddenly it dawns on me.
“Oh! Rapper! Garrett told you about his favorite RAPPER!”

This semester I'm taking a class on Contemporary Literary Theory, where rather than discussing actual works of literature, we talk about how we talk about literature. We cover things like semiotics (linguistics) and the different approaches or methods we can use to read works of literature and poetry. Of course, these theories influence more areas outside the realm of literature—science, art, philosophy, anthropology, sociology…the list goes on and on. Most of the time, I find the essays we read for this class rather dry and frustratingly inaccessible.

The ideas we study are interesting enough, and because of the particular mix of students we have in our class, discussions with our professor are often amusing and lively, whether we understand the essays or not. What fascinates me most is the power of language. The power it has to shape our worldviews, our perspectives, how we read and learn and know. Language shapes our very being.

I often come back to N. Scott Momaday’s words: “In a certain sense we are all made of words...our most essential being consists in language. It is the element in which we think and dream and act, in which we live our lives.”

I keep coming back to this because I sense the truth of these words, at least in my own life. My whole world is language and words, written and unwritten—the realm of thoughts and ideas and feelings and emotions. More concretely, I feel like all I do is read and write, read and write. If I’m not doing that, I’m talking about reading or writing.

Back to the topic of language. Much of our discussion has been about the origins and structure of language. Saussure’s concept of the sign and the signifier, how all of our words are defined in relation to other words, and so on and so forth. Within a sentence, we change one word and the entire meaning is transformed. Like raptor, or rapture, or rapper.

My fascination with language has grown exponentially since I began to be interested in taking Chinese classes. My friend Ricky was teaching us about certain Chinese words—their meanings and their characters. The Chinese language makes a lot of sense, and it makes me wonder about how this language, with its complex system of tones and characters, came into existence and developed.

For instance, take the simple phrase “Hello” in Chinese: nǐ hǎo. When broken up into its two characters, it translates “you good.” “Goodbye” is zài jiàn, or literally, “see again” or more specifically, “see you again.” Tóng xué translates “same class” or classmates. China is zhōng guó—“middle country” or kingdom. This is because the Chinese always believed that they were at the center of the world, the center of the universe.

The most interesting one I learned was hǎo, meaning “good.” Ricky explained that the character for the word hǎo is a combination of the character for female and the character for child . The total effect is that when a mother and her child are together, it is good, or hǎo. Needless to say, if I were not an English major and a Business minor, perhaps I would have enjoyed studying linguistics.