It's not even a "message," in the ordinary sense we use that word.

<McLuhan> was wrong, but only in how strongly he worded his theory. He was right, but should have hired a spin doctor to help him with the wording.

In terms of fuzzy logic McLuhan was a godlike genius. Possibly in the top seventeen Canadian godlike geniuses of the past century.

Anyway, Barthes was a message guy. You want a French medium guy, try Baudrillard, though he was daft as a brush.

These Frogs often get overexcited about their ideas. So did Barthes for that matter.

More- I'd argue Barthes is just as ridiculous as Baudrillard with "SZ".

"SZ" is even sillier than Sartre's "Being and Nothingness," and that's as silly as it gets, perhaps.

Many who have read these tomes spend the rest of their lives plotting some scheme by which they get paid- by somebody- for all the hours of their lives they wasted reading them.

I have the attention span of a fruit fly.

Yes, <Barthes> is concerned with the message and he is an "A goes to B" guy at the end of the day.

He did a great job, however, of explaining how the "media packaging" can be manipulated to hide the "real message" in <Mythologies>, an entertaining read if there ever was one.

"Einstein's Brain" is my favorite essay from that mercifully short book. I think he should never have written "SZ"- I'd rather he had spent the rest of his life writing short essays on how semiotics works in popular culture.

But he does believe in "the message" as an ontological entity, as you suggest.

I'm reminded of something one of my professors once said-

<Jess & Dom> re.: <McLuhan>

Kewl. =) I recognized the quote from an earlier reference of Dom's, but I have, to date, not yet succeeded in actually getting <Dom> to explain what exactly McLuhan was on about - and it does sound interesting...

OK, I suppose I could just find his works somewhere, but I'm too lazy to read whole book(s) when there's somebody around who could (theoretically) just summarize things for me. :p

Now, who'd have listened to that, in the many-hued polychromatic 1960s? Or even the grey 1950s, when Mars (as his chums called him) first made the point.

'The medium is the message' has the virtue of shock value. At a time when most people worried about content -- would a televised nipple turn a child into a monster? etc -- it changed the base of the argument. And led to some interesting places, eg various forms of *technological determinism*.

This can be applied to history (the links between print, literacy, Dickens, and Victorian sentimentality) or more recent debates -- eg, the contention that the very act of using digital images, freeze-frame video, remote controls etc is more likely to make the user think of human beings as objects to be manipulated than *content* does - eg, porn.

<Dom> you're being awfully sparkly over at the Challenge page, again. ;)

Did I tell you the story about John Wayne, playing a Roman soldier in the Hollywood movie 'The Greatest Story Ever Told'?

With that title, I reckon Homer could've sued 'em for narrativological disparagement. Even Homer Simpson could've sued them ...

Anyway, Wayne's job was to oversee the crucifixion and utter the line "truly this man is the son of God". Which he did, woodenly, for a few takes, until the director said "John, could you put some *awe* in your voice?"

So in precisely the same even tone, John said "Aw, surely this man is the son of God".

<As for the sparkliness, I can offer no explanation that isn't entirely innocent, and hence redundant.>

OK... ;)

But I thought we didn't approve of innocence?

I mean, consider the force of gravity... acceleration... the presence of oxygen on the planet, and the way it binds with hydrogen; chemistry. You like chemistry, dontcha? ;)

The defense rests, yerroner.

No, that's not what I mean.

I mean - I think - that I don't see such matters as a binary choice between total chaos and rule-driven orderliness. There is wriggle room. Shades of grey, and quite possibly pink. Continuums and continua and, yes, that sort of carry-on.

So it would be quite interesting if the laws of nature lapsed slightly every so often. Or even if one of their underlying symmetries sometimes broke (which seems to be the case).

Ditto people. The interesting ones aren't always predictable.

<You like chemistry, dontcha?>

I just wondered about something. Most [or merely a lot?] basic and common concepts have short, single-syllable words; sky, rock, food, earth, one two three, tree, book etc etc.

But the thing you might say they have in common, language [apart from them all containing characters etc], has multiple syllables and a fairly confusing spelling.

Now in Dutch we have the simple 'taal' but German and French join English with Sprache and langue. Do you know why?

'Wrong'. Hmm. Interesting example.

Yes, as you say, < much-used words would be short for convenience>. This is true in many languages, certainly most Indo-European ones. But whose convenience? The brevity is not a design feature or a conscious process - nobody ever *decided* to make common words short. But it's useful, and long ones get worn down in time if used frequently enough.

That's where irregular spelling comes in. Common words are often very old ones: often the spelling retains redundant letters from an older version - spelling has only been standardized since the 18th century.

English in particular has many words (knot, knife, etc) which reflect old pronunciations. So 'knife' was once something like 'kuh-niff-eh', but the initial sound and the final vowel/syllable were dropped, while the remaining vowel changed. There are patterns in these sound shifts: it's not random.

As to words such as 'language' (taal, langue, etc), I think there's an ambiguity. Language - the abstract entity, the subject of linguistics - is *not* in fact an everyday word or concept. It's too abstract. However 'talk' *is* an everyday word (and it fits the pattern I mentioned, changing from *tall-ek to 'tawk'). Another everyday word is 'tongue' (tung?).

So it boils down to which metaphorical storehouse a particular language raids when it needs an abstract word for language. Some go with versions of 'talk' or 'tongue' or 'speech'. 'Language' itself is the French word for tongue, plus a suffix: 'tongueness' might have happened instead, but French had more status that year ...

Am I making sense yet?