Vanity of Vanities

I've been thinking a lot lately about the book of Ecclesiates. It resonates so thoroughly in our culture that we don't always perceive it. It's like Shakespeare or Benjamin Franklin or Alexander Pope, where we quote it without realizing that we're quoting.

On the one hand, I find this phenomenon fascinating from a purely structural standpoint: when we say "Hope springs eternal" or "It's Greek to me" or "there's nothing new under the sun," what are the structural properties of the utterance? These phrases are so familiar and so well-worn that we typically don't think of them as citations.

It's a different situation (by degree, at least) from if we say something like: "Sound and fury signifying nothing." In this phrase, I think, we recognizing the phrase as citational. We might even know that it comes from Macbeth, or at least from Shakespeare. At the bare minimum, we recognize that it is a literary quotation; that it's different from ordinary discourse; and that someone, once upon a time, put those words together in that particular fashion.

I don't think we do recognize that with citations such as "It's Greek to me." Or at least I don't. Phrases like that just seem to get absorbed into what we apprehend as "ordinary" language.

The great linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, said that lanugage is a "system of difference without positive terms." Which just means that linguistic sign only have meaning in relation to one another. Every word we choose (Saussure calls this process of word selection the "paradigmatic" axis of language) derives its meaning from the words we exclude. If I tell you that I think oak trees are beautiful, you understand my meaning by understanding everything I've excluded: aspens, beeches, Douglas firs, maples, larches, lampposts, kittens, etc. "Oak" has no meaning that is not relational.

Saussure also discusses what he calls the "syntagmatic" axis of language, which is the combinative work--how one orders those paradigmatically selected words.

But what goes on with a phrase like: "It's Greek to me"? Both the paradigmatic and syntagmatic processes precede utterance. So the selection happens at the level of syntagm, I guess. We choose to say, "It's Greek to me," rather than, "I find it incomprehensible" or something like that. What I find interesting though, is how these phrases get in under our "citation radar."

Certain theorist, such as Roland Barthes, argue that ALL language is citational. Which is, of course, right as far as it goes. All language is pre-owned, so to speak. Even neologisms use known parts of other words. Using language entails a submission to its forms.

But we forget this. We have to forget it, or we'd go a little mad. That's why, I think, it's a little unsettling to discover the "origin" of a phrase that we use without recognizing its citationality. I think I laughed the first time I read Julius Caesar and saw "It was Greek to me."

No point to this, really, just thinking some stuff through. What I'm really interested in is why Ecclesiastes has this kind of pervasiveness in our culture. More on that later.