Some people spend a lot of time thinking about not just what a word or phrase means, but HOW it means. Most of these people are French. I’m not sure that we should take that as having any sort of profound meaning in and of itself, it just happens to be true.

I will give them some credit on the matter, French is the only language with a council active enough to succeed in protecting their language. French is little changed for the last 200 years, and though it grew out of Latin the same as Italian and Spanish, it has maintained a level of haughty snoot that I believe all languages should strive to find. It is a difficult language to learn mostly because its grammatical and verbal rules are arbitrary, which is no different from every other language, but if asked why it is so arbitrary you will be told “because we like it that way.” In America you are more likely to be told that it is that way because…. “I dunno, it just mutated, or something.”

Neither of these responses is particularly useful, but the French version shows some sort of gumption. A finely honed ability to own their mistakes as a form of intent. If you are going to do something wrong, at least do it on purpose rather by inaction. Then you can take some pride in the results.

Now, of the people who worked on the principles of meaning, how it is found, derived, formed, expressed, and evolves, the most important figure is Saussure. Often blamed by dancing people in ceremonial regalia - pant suit, tie, jacket, wildly teased and colored hair, bracelets on their wrists and their ankles – for harshing their buzz and banging on their mellow, Saussure laid down the concepts referred to by colorful linguistic rogues as the Semiotic Nightmare.

What with the haunting of dreams and all.

The Semiotic Nightmare is broken down into several components that work together to make the entirety of thought easily more convoluted and difficult then if you were simply scatter shot with the whole thing. I am going to abuse you by breaking it down, because I am not known for my kindness when it comes to berating people and or language. I am also not going to give them to you in an order that will assist in understanding the components, I’m just putting them down in the order in which I like them.

Binary oppositions express and define each other through contrast. Black and white are a primary example. You can really only tell how black or white something is by comparing it to how white or black it is not. This gets easily confused when you remember that the colors of white light, and the colors of paint white are completely reversed. And so the Nightmare descends into your consciousness with its own irreverent cultists.

Diagetics is more fun than horrible, but it has its own sensitive and implausible terror all the same. Diagetics, which has nothing to do with Dianetics, they just share a lot of the same letters, presents the notion that there are layered levels of meaning that intersect and bisect each other. The classic example is a song heard on the radio in a film is in the same diagesis as the characters in the film as opposed to the overture music that sets the mood or tone and is not heard by the characters but exists as part of the diagesis of the audience.

Finally, the corner stone of semiology if found in the brains creation of incredibly doomed and wholly faulty ties between the sign, signifier, and signified. A picture of a tree, the word tree, and an actual tree are only as similar as the individual interpreting all three. Everyone can picture a tree, but it will likely not be the same tree and in that we can see that language has no meaning.

Or does it simply have no meaning without context?

I would be a fool to let you off so easily at this moment, so I’ll throw in a final tidbit that should leave you gibbering in your soup the next time you happen to have soup and a few spare minutes to start thinking overly hard. At some point even the French decided that its all too much and that ultimately meaning is not something you can apply a strict structure too so an irascible man named Derrida began pulling the whole thing apart with the theory of Deconstruction.

And you can blame him for every pretentious person you meet with an overtly fatalistic attitude. For every youth who would rather not try, for every politician that talks for hours without mentioning a single fact about the topic they are supposed to be conversing on, for every boss that somehow can wield the word ’synergy’ without knowing what it is. That’s your guy. This Derrida person. He didn’t mean to do it, it just sort of happened that way.

Which does nothing to explain all of the things involving ducks and rows. Nothing at all.