• Please_Do_Not@lemm.eeEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    You care for and love a baby, simple as and ends at that. Do you think words can’t have nuance and multiple usages? Was everyone referring to taboo sex or overbearing paternalism when “Daddio” became a common nickname in the jazz age?

    I’d personally be immediately turned off if someone called me “daddy” or something similar during sex, but that doesn’t mean I think everyone who does so is saying it literally and is a Freudian freak. Words get reused in other contexts, most often due to part of their connotation or denotation, rather than the whole/literal, and you’ll find yourself confused often if you don’t see that’s how language works.

    I say this not as someone who calls anyone “baby,” but as someone who wouldn’t want to be thought of as a pedo if I did, and as a linguist who will die on Derrida’s hill lol. I find the meme funny and point out the above in good fun, not in classic heated internet debate.

    • smokinliverEnglish
      2·
      22 hours ago

      Would you be so kind as to enlighten me on the Concept of the Derridas hill?

      Also I cuncur, daddy often means something completely different than dad and baby just seems to embody both meanings, but they are still to be distingished.

      • Please_Do_Not@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        15 hours ago

        Derrida has some interesting thoughts about how language takes meaning, and language’s inability to directly access or reflect the “natural world,” which it is meant to define as something beyond language itself. (Contradicting the structuralist point of view that language, although arbitrary, directly accesses and communicates something that itself transcends language by reflecting it via a natural and empirical system).

        He posits that due to the ways human thoughts are formed and a network of meaning works, we can never use language to get to something more real "behind " the language (and if you think you have, that’s just more language).

        It ultimately destabilizes the relationship between any “signifier” (word) and “signified” (the thing that that word is supposed to represent or refer to) and has a ton of other social and cultural implications as well, but that’s why “Of Grammatology” is a lot longer than a comment chain haha.

        • MajorHavoc@programming.devEnglish
          3·
          7 hours ago

          That’s interesting. I think Derrida had it right.

          I feel like we’ve had a hint about that in database design for years - no matter how closely we think we have modeled the underlying reality to be tracked, we always eventually discover that we have not.

          • Please_Do_Not@lemm.eeEnglish
            3·
            5 hours ago

            Agreed! Which ultimately means the more confident you are that the system tracks, the farther you are from seeing the whole thing…