Sign, Sign, Everywhere A Sign

This week in class we started Structuralism. We covered Saussure and some of Frye, and it is Saussure that I found the most interesting.  He had the idea that regarding words, there was the sign, which was broken up into a signifier and a signified. The signifier is the auditory or visual image, and the signified is the mental process that follows the signifier. For example, if someone either says the word “cat”, or shows me a picture of one, I know what it is. Yet this seems fairly subjective to me. Misheard song lyrics are a great example of this. Creedence Clearwater Revival has a song “Bad Moon Rising”, and the lyric “There’s a bad moon on the rise” is surprisingly often heard as “There’s a bathroom on the right”. The two different lyrics present very different images, which can change the entire meaning of the song.

Another thing that we talked about was how one image or symbol can come to represent another, such as a celebrity figure being used to sell a product. Once a public figure becomes synonymous with the product being sold, the theory is that every time you see that figure you will think of the product, and therefore want to buy it, due to the other things the symbol promoting the product represents. So if I see Drew Barrymore  on the television, and she is telling me that all she uses is Cover Girl makeup, I will think that if I want to be more like her, I should use Cover Girl, too. Then I might be more successful, skinnier, with a great on again off again boyfriend and maybe one day, quite a bit of money which I will of course spend on Cover Girl cosmetics. I think that everyone is aware of this, and it only matters how suggestible you are, and what you are already likely to buy. For example, I don’t really wear makeup, so seeing Drew Barrymore telling me to buy Cover Girl on my television screen is hardly going to result in my running to the nearest Rite Aid to make a purchase. However, I do love to eat, so when I watched Brad Pitt shoveling all kinds of snack foods into his mouth over the duration of Ocean’s 11 -13, I made quite a few trips to the snack bar.

Works Cited

Fogerty, John, and Larry Morris. "Bad Moon Rising." Creedence Clearwater Revival. Impact, 1969. MP3.