A girlfriend once said to me, “I don’t like the fact that the word ‘gay’ has changed its meaning.” She was born in the mid-80s when it changed already, so I think people have an inherent sense that you can’t just fuck with the language. There’s an essence that reasserts itself.
I don’t know the answer to this, but what if there’s a connection between the essence of a thing and the very sound? This is apparent in onomatopoeia. What if every word is onomatopoeic to an extent?
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As much as I have distaste for his influence on linguistics/semiotics and to a more tenuous extent pomo, Saussure debunked the idea that onomatopoeia has inherent meaningful properties or "semes" (units of semantic meaning)
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Just due to physiology and a shared need for common concepts I think its fair to say most languages will have sounds that seem to project certain concepts but the connection between acoustics and information is heavily overstated.
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When I remember the essay Saussure discussed this I'll mention it here
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I haven’t read him since school, and even then I probably only read one famous essay or book. And it’s probably the essay/book that you’re talking about, since the concept seems familiar. Still, I think there’s a natural resistance to phoney political language.
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I hope so but humans seem incapable of not surprising me with an inexhaustible amount of cognitive biases
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Pay attention to what they do, not what they say.
End of conversation
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