Signs

I was watching The Da Vinci Code last week and I found the opening scene to be rather interesting. Robert Langdon is introduced as an expert in symbols and their meanings. He opens up a conference by showing a small part of a picture having people yell out guesses as to what it's meaning is, and then he expands the picture to reveal a bigger meaning. For example he is zoomed in a picture of a trident, people shouted, words like "hatred" "devil" satanism" Robert Langdon responds by revealing that the picture is of Poseidon and instead of the devil's pitchfork it was a trident.

This reminded me of our discussion on the Minister's Black Vail and Lacan. We've discussed how often times the referent stays the same yet the signified changes based on different social structures or often times the meaning can change over time. In the case of The Da Vinci Code, a metal rod with three sharp points at the end of it stays the same physical object through all these different interpretations, yet the signified changes, image of power used by a Greek God or the weapon of a fallen angel.

This happens all the time with symbols when someone else uses them and over time different groups of people see their meaning as something drastically different. An example of this is the pentagram. This symbol's earliest meaning was in reference to the goddess Venus. This symbol's signified changes in different cultures. In the Chinese culture the pentagram is used in explaining how the 5 main elements either strengthen or destroy another element.

Now with the rise of rock and metal music, the pentagram's meaning took on a darker meaning. The pentagram was flipped upside down, and the image of a goat head was posted over it. Then people started claiming that the pentagram was a symbol of devil worship. While it always interesting to see how symbols change in different cultures or over time, it is sad to see when symbols that are meant to be of peace are turned to mean evil or have negative connotations,

Words Words Words

Words. Squiggles on a page that, through years of being told they have meaning…have meaning. In literature theory, we talked about how words are broken down into 3 parts, the signifier, signified, and the indexical. Now, I love language and learning about origins of the word. This is one of the reasons I enjoyed taking Latin as a language in high school. 

Now, when we were being taught about the 3 different parts we used the word Pen as our subject. We talked about how there was the signifier, the three letters P,E, and N standing next to each other with a space on both sides of them. Then there is the signified, which is the meaning of the word “pen” you think about using it to take notes in class, write a letter, maybe spin around your fingers if the lecture is particularly boring. Finally there is the indexical, the physical object that we call a “pen.”

            This immediately brought me back to my grade school days when I read the book Frindle, by Andrew Clements. For those of you who don’t know about this book I will give a quick summary.  Nick is a 5^th grader with a very disliked English teacher. To make time pass at the end of class one day he asks her where the origin of words comes from. She tells him to write a paper on it. After he does this he comes up with a new word, frindle.  A frindle is what Nick started calling pens. This soon caught on not only in his class, but also across the nation. His teacher hated the word frindle because she thought it was insulting to the history that the word “pen” has. (In French penne means bird’s feather or quill, which was an early form of a pen.) This book showed that how we place meaning is extremely powerful. Had Nick’s friends not jumped in and said ‘a pen is a frindle and a frindle is a pen” then the word would have died out.

            I learned this first hand when last year I had just gone for a run and my legs were killing me, I then had to climb two flights of stairs. While slowly walking up the stairs I was complaining to a friend about how I hate stairs, hated them so much that I was going to call them “stecs” cause that word seemed to me at the time, better suited.  This caught on with my friends for about a week but died out. Now when I complain about stairs, my friends ask me if I mean “stecs”

            Now moving onto a new topic entirely. I started thinking about how we use abbreviations. I also realized that abbreviations could, in a way, be broken down into the 3 parts.  Bare with me for a sec. Let’s take the example, “etc.” We have the signifier, “etc” we have the signified, the meaning placed on the letters, “and all the other things” then we have the Indexical, “et cetera.” Now I know the words “et cetera” isn’t a physical thing. But let’s pretend that words are a physical thing, just so that my theory works out.

            I then realized how over years this style of abbreviating word first started to strengthen the English language, and in recent years, regressed back to the Stone Age.  Now I’m sure you’re wondering, “whooh what? Tell me how? That can’t be true can it?” Yes, it’s true. Now calm down and let me explain. Abbreviations are often used when you need to say a long word but need to say it quickly. This is most often used my doctors, using EKG instead of the German word Elektrokardiogramm. Slowly, however, this concept bled into pop culture and teenage word play. Best friends became BF, and as social networking picked up and people started texting. “See you later” became “C U later”, “I love you” became “I luv you” Oh my God became “OMG” and %$#@ you became F U” Now, in this case, I become a lot like Mrs. Grangers from Frindle, I hate that we are butchering language to such an extreme.

            This is why I enjoy going to websites like failbook.com or happyface.com and reading people correcting spelling on facebook statuses. I do this simply because it remind me that there are people just like me out there that actually care about the words they use.  Here is an example of one.  In one of my favorite ones, the status says “how do u make wknds longer? “ the first comment was “spell it properly and you get ‘weekends’ is that long enough for you?”

Facebook spelling corrections 

Now I'm not saying that misspelling a word is the worst thing in the word. I'm an English major and I have to admit that I slip up when I'm not paying attention. But please, don't willingly butcher the English language.

Now I’ve been ranting for a while now so I’m going to end it by saying please uses proper English.  Words have a lot of power and they get that power by how we use them. Let’s end the stereotype that American only know one language and don’t even know that one well.