Signifier and the Signified

I've read Sassure before for various literary criticism classes and papers, but I still enjoy his thoughts on the nature of the sign as an abstract concept. To this end I chose an Orality and Literacy passage in Chp. 4 on the relationship between words and visual signifiers titled "Words are Not Signs" which gets to the heart of the passage in a stunningly stright forward manner.

My underlined piece begins by observing that even fairly lately, alchemists and other learned peoples would use a symbol, frequently in the zodiac, to denote the contents of a particular bottle. Why? I thinks this ties nicely in to what we have been learning about the place of memory. A zodiac symbol brings up infinite allusions that illustrate a far more descriptive histroy than simply a word. If one were to label a bottle with the word "Mercury" you would now that the flask contained mercury, but the word is empty beyond that designation. If you employ the symbol instead, now the bottle contains Mercury, the essence of the Greek god; created by the planet as it sends out rays that bury themselves deep in the Earth. Allusions of fluidity, movement, travel are instantly bestowed upon the containd element. While these designations somewhat depend on an awareness of the alcehmists' understanding of the properties of Mercury and its development on this planet, much of the allusion remains to this day. (For more on the history and classical allusions of Mercury I suggest everyone read The Baroque Cycle, a series of three books by Neal Stephenson that detail the development of Natural Philosophy, Trade, Politics, and much more through the metaphor of Mercury. If this all sounds boring there is also grand adventure, romance, and pirates. Can't beat pirates. Total pages is something like 2500, but the whole trilogy only took me about two and a half weeks all told. They're that good.)

Visual symbols have largely been replaced with words as designations. This is very probably a more efficiant, clear way to communicate with our fellow literate peoples, but the loss of layered meaning has truncated the meaning of "Mercury".

P.s. I was also really interested to learn about the ivy bush as a desginator of the tavern. I knew about the pawn broker's golden balls and the barber's pole, but the bush was new to me. If I ever have a tavern I'm totally going to plant an ivy out front!