Discerning bloggers have already picked this up—the original post went up a couple of weeks ago—but I keep being amused by a little story from a 1956 issue of Little Lulu.
In it, Lulu and Alvin discover the arbitrary nature of linguistic signification.
I excerpt just three panels from the story here, but you can read it in full—and with brilliant comic timing—at the link above.
The kids are charmed by the slippage between signifier and signified, you see.
In one of the most joyful panels ever, language is revealed to be a mere construct. Chaos ensues.
By the time the adults get hold of the game, "foot" and "feet" have become so destabilized that they can only be construed in terms of natural (as opposed to arbitrary) signifiers: as a kind of onomatopoeia.
Ever notice how you never see pictures of John Stanley and Ferdinand de Saussure in the same room?
For extra credit: read this and watch:
"...on a (k)night like this": guffaw!
ReplyDelete"The kids are charmed by the slippage between signifier and signified, you see."
ReplyDeleteAs a fan of both Little Lulu and Barthes' literary theory, you have completely and utterly won me over.