#language

Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#freud #horses #lacan #language #post-structuralism

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature. ↗

— Cyril Connolly

#classical #dead #dispute #distribution #emphasis

"Let God be true but every man a liar" is the language of true faith. ↗

— Aiden Wilson Tozer

#every #every man #faith #god #language

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet. ↗

— Tahar Ben Jelloun

#born #french #french language #guest #i

No," I replied testily. "I'm pretty sure 'digital' is Latin for 'fingeral,' so finger cancer equals digital cancer. This is all basic anatomy, Dr. Roland." The Dr. Roland told me that he thought I was overreacting, and the "fingeral" wasn't even a real word. Then I told him that I though he was underreacting, probably because he's embarrassed that he doesn't know how Latin works. Then he claimed that "underrecating" isn't a word either. The man has a terrible bedside manner. ↗

— Jenny Lawson

#grammar-humor #humor #language #equality

It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar. ↗

— Fred Frith

#does #find #fluently #grammar #language

I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc. ↗

— Howard Gardner

#brain #content #different #different kinds #etc

Everybody has a language or code that they use with their wife or their girlfriend or boyfriend or what have you. It's a language aside from the language they have with strangers. I've always been maybe an abuser of alliteration, but I've always loved it and I like how those words sound together. ↗

— Ben Gibbard

#aside #been #boyfriend #code #everybody

Language for me narrates the pictures in my mind. When I work on designing livestock equipment I can test run that equipment in my head like 3-D virtual reality. In fact, when I was in college I used to think that everybody was able to do that. ↗

— Temple Grandin

#college #designing #equipment #everybody #fact

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. ↗

— G. H. Hardy

#because #die #forgotten #ideas #languages