Can words mean the same thing every time?
Image: International Dunhuang Project, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Can words mean the same thing every time?
Imagine you're texting a friend about seeing a movie. You text, "I loved the movie last night." But when you talk about it later, you can't remember exactly what you liked about it. Your friend thinks you meant something different.
Derrida's idea of 'différance' suggests that the meaning of words shifts over time and context, like your vague memory of the movie. It's a French term combining 'to defer' and 'to differ,' showing that words don't have a single, fixed meaning.
Example
You text, "I loved the movie last night," but later, you can't recall the specific scenes you liked, leading to a different interpretation when you talk about it.
Remember this
'Différance' reminds us that words and meanings are fluid, not fixed.
Text adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Real
How can a word mean different things over time?
Dickinson's dashes do
Dickinson's dashes fracture syntax to mirror the fluidity of thought
Derrida's 'there is nothing outside the text' means for literary criticism
Can everything we know be just words on a page?
New Criticism
New Criticism focused on the poem as an autonomous object
Rimbaud's 'systematic derangement of all the senses' sought
Rimbaud's 'systematic derangement of all the senses' sought a new poetic language through extremity
Goethe's concept of Bildung means
Goethe's Bildung: Self-cultivation through experience, central to German humanism
Swipe through 100 ML concepts daily
Open Pocket Polymath