Your Baby Can Read: General Linguistics

“Language is not a function of the speaker; it is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual. It requires premeditation…Speaking, on the contrary, is an individual act.” Ferdinand de Saussure clearly and very brilliantly compares the difference between languages and speaking is the psychological connection between sound and images. He argues that language is a “social institution” and a connection between name and thing, which bond in the brain causing linguistic recognition. However, speaking is an abstract concept that materializes sounds via use of syllables, noise, or movements of any object and the connection to the image.

In Your Baby Can Read, their main technique is the recognition of the word along with the image of the word. For example, ‘TREE’ will flash the image of a blowing tree. This, if compared to Saussure’s argument, mixes the both language and speaking techniques with the connection name, thing and the social construction of what the object should be called (language). It is societies construction that a ‘TREE’ should be called a ‘TREE’ over a made up word like ‘flamrant’; therefore, this program combines language and speaking in one “successful program.”

One links, mentally, a word that has been repeated frequently and through use of sound in order to read, and as in elementary, if one reads more, one’s vocabulary expands. In the elementary level it is often recommended that students read very often in order to improve fluency and speech impediments, if there are any. It is in this linkage that people have learned to linguistically improve upon reading, writing, speaking and social acceptance of language.


Saussure de, Ferdinand. "Course in General Linguistics." Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, Ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 59-67

Jesus, I'd Like to Eat Now

She slapped me. How was I supposed to react to that? I cannot possibly remember the last time she hit me. But this time, I really brought it out of her. She couldn’t accept a gay son and God in the same home, so she kicked me out and let me fend for myself. She said that “God doesn’t like fags and would never house one if it even spoke a word.” But the bitch couldn’t tell a pickle from a cucumber, so how am I to believe that God wouldn’t house me? She was as senile as a five foot pole and as crazy as I’d like to believe. The woman raised me to believe that Jesus accepted everyone, but when it came to act out on that love, she ran faster than AIDS.

Actually, I lie. My mother was a great mother with all the other great mothers and wonderful dads-they were all just as dandy and precise. They congregated around each other during potluck and spoke about how great the sermon was that Pastor Parker had just given while the homeless gathered around the community center trying to garnish some clothes. I’m sure they all loved feeding their scraps to the like.

Now, you ask me to speak of my mother and expect me to sanctify her, but she never did anything kind for me but curse my birth and speak of eternal damnation.

Actually, I lie. She did buy me a Blow Pop, once. May she rest in peace. Amen.

Bakhtin Said What?

Bakthtin said it and I agree: Language cannot be held down. Language has a greater means of understanding than either of us care to acknowledge; it has so much more power than we give it. Language has no base or limit and takes on any shape it wants. It can take several forms and mean everything and anything to every single person of the 6, 799, 929, 555 population who inhabit our great planet (http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html). I don't mean to put words into Bakhtin's mouth, but my interpretation is that he believed language cannot be connected to anything tangible because it is far too great to be anything. Perhaps that is a little too general to comprehend just what is intended, but really that language means whatever the beholder wants it to be.

Though language can be interpreted in various ways, it does not always mean that it should be or that everyone can understand it as such. To exemplify this, Bakhtin uses a peasant who cannot coordinate his understanding to that of an upper social class' intellectual/academic training. Can a peasant understand what a scholars spend years researching and studying in one discussion? What does it take to have a "common" person understand the language that people who are in a higher intellectual ladder use? Does uncomprehending mean that a "peasant" cannot learn? If so, what does it take?

The peasant can learn language and will learn. Sure it takes greater means and far more work, but it happens. The peasant can learn through the interaction with alternative resources such as written words(book, magazines, newspapers), television, and the internet. The peasant finds it difficult to comprehend language as a person who is formally taught in an institution of learning to analyze and make meaning; the peasant must settle to learn language through alternate outlets of communication.

Bahktin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Formalist Perspective on "Jesus, I'd Like to Eat Now"

Viktor Shklovsky describes the purpose of art to be the recovery of sensation in life, to make one feel things and to sensationalize things so much so that they are not recognized He continues, “Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important…”(16). However, the picture depicted in “Jesus, I’d Like to Eat Now” cannot be perceived as formalist because one cannot look at the picture without turning it into an object because it is set out to translate a purpose; it carries significance that makes it difficult to defamiliarize the picture. What would happen if the words were removed from the picture and only the people remained dining at what looks to be the final dinner before Jesus’ crucifixion? What allows for a piece of art to remain in the formalist technique is looking at the design of art and not the object which is being presented. The technique use in the picture then becomes that LGBTIQQ Community, which is deeply scrutinized and sought to be made a sin, is being placed in the position that Jesus was in before being crucified. In that sense, though, it can be said that not that much thought about Jesus’ embodiment was placed, but was instead done for shock value and comedy. The difficulty in being able to defamiliarize oneself with a very iconic image of Christ at the table with His Disciples becomes a query because, though the object is in new perception, it still very much connects itself to the image Christians, and the like, have of Christ. Nonetheless, one may provide then that formalism takes on the molding of defamiliarization of objects in all forms of art and literature and focus primarily on the essence of the art presented.


Shklovsky, Viktor. "Art as Technique." Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, Ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 15-21.