Blog #3

The Saussure theory is based on the fact that the word we attribute to an object gives it importance and recognition. But as Shakespeare said, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” English not being my mother-tongue, I had to learn as an adult to attribute words to objects that were meaningless to me when I was reading or seeing them. Imagine reading a menu with fish listed at a restaurant. As much as salmon is almost the same in French “saumon,” I had to wonder what will arrive on my plate when I ordered the sea bass. Nowheredays with the language evolution, we can easily find words borrowed from other languages; English often pick some words from French when it comes to cuisine, literature, fashion vocabulary. But this is where it gets complex; does this word has been borrowed correctly, or as it lost its original meaning for a new one imposed? And I can assure you that it is the second option that applies, most often, losing all the roots and the original rhetoric of the word, unfortunately.

Finally, taking three words of an object with the same function but different values due to the name it has been given to show how language can be versatile. Let’s take a throne, a chair, and a stool. They do have the purpose of seating, but if we were to read that the king sat on his majestic stool, the image created in our mental projection would be less impressive than the one of a King sitting on his magnificent throne. What if when we decided the name of things, a throne was named a stool, and a stool a throne?