"In one sense," says Lindemann, "a word by itself has no meaning" (176). Then in that same sense absolutely nothing has meaning! Clearly, of course, Lindemann's making a mere point: meaning is made as words dialogically interrelate with each other.
True. But I, too, am making a mere point: if discourse is heteroglossaic, then meaning is made at multiple levels, not merely at the level of the sentence (I say this despite my "love affair with sentences" Bishop 119), so it's an oversimplification to state that "it's not the word that creates meaning" (Lindemann 176).
On the contrary, the word is meaning; that is, just like each and every one of us, the word inherently possess meaning- more meaning than we could ever possibly imagine, and this meaning is made as the word is "spoken" into existence (whether done so verbally or textually); moreover, its meaning is remade each and every time the word is invoiced and appropriated, thus multiplying its meaning exponentially, yet its essential meaing remains, paradoxically, the same. So though "The Word" may arguably be "begotten, not made" (The Nicene Creed), the word is mimetically made and remade, born over and over, again and again.
The word, therefore, is not a mere building-block used to create something with meaning, something with more meaning than the word itself. No. Each word, despite its synchronic definition (i.e., the meaning associated with its fixed form at any given point in the diachronic discourse), is a language unto itself; and words, like language, make meaning because they are meaning- even if there exists no consensus as to what that meaning may mean!
Bishop, Wendy. Elements of Alternate Style. Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc.: 1997.
Words, like people, naturally "bump into" (Lindemann 176) each other in the hurly-burly, hustle and bustle of every day living, and it is in the bumping (and grinding!) that meaning is made... "Say the word I'm thinking of/Have you heard the word is love?" ("The Word," by The Beatles)... So make love, not war. Word.
ReplyDelete"The Last Word"
ReplyDeleteThe word matters because meaning is made with it and within it. The word is, arguably, the principal location where meaning making begins to be made, and how can we begin to make meaning if there's no meaning to begin with? The question then is... who has the last word?
"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word..." Addie from Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" (1930).
ReplyDeleteWell, after reading Somers' essay on the need to abandon linear models of composition instruction by teaching more holistically, recognizing that all aspects of the writing process, including revision, are recursive, while also acknowledging her research showing that most inexperienced writers tend to lean on the linear model in which lexical issues trump semantic issues, I've decided that my love for the word, for words, has blinded me, so much so that I cannot see the forest (meaning) for the trees (words).
ReplyDelete