Reading Killingsworth's "Appeal Through Tropes" reminded me of an argument I came up with when I read Locke's "An Essay On Human Understanding." I remember thinking about how Locke wants language to be more closely related to what it represents, and wondering, How would that ever happen? With the emergence of slang and fads and (oh good heavens) texting, there is just no way to avoid the alterations in language that sometimes cause silly confusion.
Killingsworth described metaphors in a way that made me think about how people express themselves. By calling Queen Elizabeth II "the crown," people are expressing what they think of Queen Elizabeth II (127). More specifically, they are expressing what they don't think of Queen Elizabeth II. They think of royalty when they think of her, not her age or her wealth or her family. The same thing happens when things like slang emerge. People make connections when they speak. Televisions were called "the tube" years ago, and I have no idea why, though I think it was something about how televisions used to be made. I wish I had better examples, but the point is that language changes as a result of metaphors. Things just stick, and eventually get put in the dictionary, and eventually make the next generation wonder what on earth their parents are talking about when they talk about watching "I Love Lucy" reruns on the tube.
Irony doesn't exactly fit that particular example, but it still applies to the notion of expression. Using Irony is a way of expressing how one thinks something should be by pointing out how it is not. Sarcasm, for example. "Wow, that explanation was crystal clear," actually might mean, "Um, I'm confused. You didn't explain that well at all." In that case the sarcasm was used in order to express that the explanation "should" have been crystal clear, but wasn't.
Jaylyn-
ReplyDeleteReading your post that Locke wanted language to be closer to what it represented, two ideas came to mind-- one, that Locke perhaps wanted language to revert to being what Burke theorized naming was done "... not for the sheer glory of the tning, but because of its bearing on human welfare" (p. 294). Burke used the eskimo tradition of 15 words for differnt types of snow as an example. The only idea that occured to me in terms of making language closer to what it represents would be to reintroduce (?) the concept of onomatopoeia and try to encourage people to invent a more musical slang based on words sounding like what they represent... "water" kind of tumbles and flows, for instance.
What you pointed out about how slang evolves, and how texting is affecting language only makes me more thankful for Saussere and the "crossing out but leaving" form of erasure, because his idea helps readers stay conscious of the actual word they're (corrupting...ooops...) slanging. I see Saussere's "erasure" as a close cousin or development of Etymology.
A) Tv's were called the tube because they used to be made of cathode ray tubes.
ReplyDeleteB) When I think of "the crown" all of those other ideas also come to mind. It's not that I don't think of them, it's just that the other examples you used are either too specific for the uneducated masses to understand or too vague for the audience to identify her as the queen of England. I think the idea of defining something by what it isn't has more to do with the name that we finally end up giving it and less to do with the ideas that come to mind. The crown works perfectly because that is something that is truly unique to her and easily identifiable by the uneducated masses. This relates back to identifying her by what she isn't because, in trying to define her in such a way as to distinguish her from the many other old right people in the world, we would say that she is not a civilian, and we would thus arrive at her royalty status.
I think that metaphors are a way of making language more closely to what it represents, as you put it. Metaphor allows a second level, so to speak, of explanation in its words when describing a particular thing such as when Killingsworth says, "love is a rose. (122)" We are getting a word in "rose" that is basically directly associated with a picture in our minds of a real and tangible thing, a particular type of plant. By giving us this image, metaphor allows people to craft a better understanding of what is meant by the term "love" by being able to connect it with associated characteristics of a rose. I am not sure if this makes any sense, but a think that Killingsworth does add some interesting thoughts to what Locke talked about.
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