Yep, that's right, we don't really grasp the words we use, in any language. We don't really know how they work, and we can't ever know why they mean anything. "Rubbish…" I hear most of you thinking to yourselves: surely a word is a sign, visual or audible (which it is), which has developed a shared meaning (which it has), understandable by those members of the particular community that uses it. Fair enough, but the post-structuralist men (and women) from Del Monte, they say "No!", there's more to the written mark and the spoken word than meets the eye (or the ear).

Being the creatures of habit that we are, we are conditioned to use language without question, without thought of its inner workings. It's like a big car: most of us don't quite know how it goes - we've got a hazy idea of exploding petrol with sparks in pistons and something to do with air and oil, but most of us aren't mechanics, so we don't give it much thought. The car goes, we're happy. Now, unlike our big metaphoric car, language doesn't break down, and you can't crash it… apricot like bubble-mucker any johnny?

Yes, it does break down, and it does cough and splutter, and sometimes there is too much choke. Sometimes words don't mean what they're supposed to. Sometimes they break the law. Sometimes they confuse people and tell lies. And when you actually get down to the nitty-gritty of it, how do you define the limits of a word’s meaning? Well, you just can't. For example, when we talk about a word having a definite, rigid meaning ("small means not big") to begin with, we are generalising its use out of context. What we've actually done is a bit of mental slight-of-hand: we've taken a word and pretended to have divorced it from any specific context, but what we've actually done is stuck it in another specific context so as to "study it" (like this paragraph). On top of that we arrogantly assume the new context to be somehow superior (this is a brilliant paragraph). All we've done is shifted the location of use, and the use is still specific, not general. We have no greater an objective grasp of its meaning than we did in the first place. If anything, we have less.

For example, say to yourself, in a serious, matter of fact, must-open-a-window kind of way "I'm hot". If we do the slight-of-hand thing with the last part of that statement, that is taking it out of its specific context ("I am…"), and looking it up in the OED - we find that "hot" means: " - adj. Of high temperature, very warm, giving or feeling heat…". Well, that makes sense. But "hot" can mean a load of totally different things depending on how you use it. As an experiment, wear a body-hugging dress with low-cleavage, suspenders and no knickers, and turn to your girlfriend with a panting sort of look. Then, in a sultry, dirty voice, say - "I'm hot." I bet you she won't take that to mean you want a window opening.

What I'm trying to say is we can't take words out of their original context to study objectively what they mean. It just doesn't work consistently as a method for studying language, no matter how much we want it too. We glean more about a word's meaning when we use it than when we look it up in the dictionary. To stir things up a little, consider also that we can't discuss the meaning of a word without using more words. We can't stop language and have a look under the bonnet, without using language to do so. And if meaning is inherently fluid and unstable (use-specific), where does that leave us when we're trying to describe “meaning” in objective terms? It's like talking to your own mouth… it becomes an endless feed-back loop of blind, meaningless waffle that never quite hits the mark.

"But words must mean something…" I hear you say, "…or how can I understand what you've written, fool!" Yes, words have meanings, but only communally. They only mean something when they're used between people. In that sense, they reflect our communality as social beings, but it's a communality we can never really fulfil, we can never truly communicate our personal world-view, just approximate it's relevance to other people through words. We can't help but be individuals stuck in localised bodies, fixed to the singular perspectives of our own personal realities, shoe-horned into our own narrow egos like a fat man's foot stuffed into a white stiletto.

Yet words are what we share most of, they bind us to each other. On the sly, most of us are communally selective - we live in communities of interest. We hang around with crowds who like the same things we do, and share similar meanings to our own. The less we know a person the more general our topics of conversation, our available communal meanings, become. The better we know someone, the more specific. We adapt our language use according to the company we find ourselves in. Some people will even alter their accents so as to blend in better, like linguistic camouflage. What I'm pointing out, is unconsciously we feel how unreliable language is, and we'll do anything to avoid having tricky conversations when meaning brakes down; we want to avoid people who have a limited concept of our communal "meanings", in other words, we avoid people who don't "understand" us. We inevitably stay within our social comfort zones so as not to experience challenging modes and codes of speech and expression. In that sense, our social groups are the result of a long process of selecting the linguistic group we are most comfortable with; and I don't mean language groups, I mean different sub-groups within a language who use it in specific ways.

As a social event, amongst all of these different sub-groups, the whole of the language we use today is the accumulative result of its use by countless other speakers in countless other situations. Sometimes we inherit clear meanings, but they inevitably fade with time and mutate as communities of interest reinterpret and redefine them, pass them on or reject their use. Meanings overlap and feed into themselves and each other, shift and dissolve, but are only ever passed on or received. They are both the product and the sustainer of any specific community. While discussing literature, Barthes sees the same thing:

"The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from
the innumerable centres of culture… the writer
can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior,
never original. His only power is to mix writings,
to counter the ones with the others, in such a
way as never to rest on any one of them."

We can't escape our own languages. We can't break out of them as the definition and realisation of our communities (I include all types of communication here). Language is like the ultimate glue. It sticks to everything you experience, and unless you're the Buddha, or maybe Jesus, it's impossible to transcend. We can't hit the edit button and undo it, we can't step outside of it (go on, have a go!). We just can't get away from it. Once we've learnt how to use it, it defines us; in many ways it is us. (Or is it? Maybe it's its own thing? Maybe it's some weird alien life-form that's parasitically attached itself to our brain waves and lives off our delusions of self-expression! Tin-foil beanies are definitely in order.)

Anyway, coming back to some sense, and Barthes' quote up there in the title, there's an idea that's been floating around for some time now that language is a self-contained phenomenon, endlessly regurgitating itself through the million mouths of its linguistic community (not a pretty sight, I know). If we can't step outside of it, and we can't detach ourselves from it, and we can't use it to explore itself, it has no borders that we can cross. It has limitations, yes, what else keeps poets busy? But those limits are hitherto indefinable beyond language itself. Meaning is not stable, no matter how much we tell ourselves it is. It is inevitably subjective, and paradoxically, only exists as a communal event. I use a word according to what I've learnt it means, and simply hope that you've learnt something similar, that we've shared enough of a common experience in a language we both understand.

If all language use is therefore second-hand at best, how can any of us really tell the truth, if the words we use to express it aren't even truly our own? How can we use language to do anything but perpetuate its own meanings, to promote it's own inherent betrayal of the personal in favour of the communal? If language, as an abstract, self-fulfilling beast is the only point of access we have to a shared truth, doesn't that leave us rather buggered as individual beings? Whoring our unique experiences just for an endlessly perverted sense of common understanding? Fake creations of our own literal prostitution? Pam ddiawl ddyliwn i droi at yr iaith fain i gyfathrebu gyda neb? Onid oes gennyf i'r hawl i gael fy neall yn fy iaith fy hun?

Or maybe Barthes was wrong and there is such a thing as "The Truth" independent of language. Maybe truth is something beyond conceptual reach that you just have to have faith in. It can't be rationalised or analysed or anal-ised or anything. It just is, man. Maybe truth is the only word that doesn't really work, doesn't really mean anything, that can't be fully possessed by language. And maybe that's a good thing. Or, maybe I've just talked my own head up my own arse, and all this quasi-post-structuralist nonsense will implode in 2012, when we'll all be communicating in fluffy-cloud speech-bubbles, like in the cartoons.