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This is not a dog, but a picture of a dog, a representation merely, the dog itself is old now, probably older as you look at him, and were he here and now, instead of there and then, he'd be bitting lumps off you all and snarling like the wolf he's not. "Good boy Jess", or rather "good girl" for Jess is a bitch. I was lying to you in the way anchorage often does.
En France
Ze French would call eem Chien or Chienne to be more correct, crazy ne'st pas?
Les Boches or the Hun, as the SUN puts it, call dogs "hunt" as in "brittisher Schweinhunt" as they used to say in the movies.
BUT who is right?
What would Adam,or Eve say?
What lesson have we learnt?
Why is bitch in English a term of abuse?
Why is a woman sometimes called a"dog"
Why is the phrase "why Billy Joe you old dawg you"
soundin' like we're talkin' REESPECT?

Big questions dudes....


ARBITRARY
That's the connection between some signs and the things they signify, there ain't no cause or ought or right in the connection it's just what folks agreed to.....  

not you womenfolk of course 'cos you don't have to agree to being called no bitch, no dog , no cow, no cat, no bird, no nuthin' you don't like the sound of or the sense of for that matter
Hey!
Sometimes we've got to fall out over words
Heard the one about the Eskimo ( or rather Inuit ) who had forty names for snow?

Why is the text blue?
Philosophers very often talk about
investigating, analysing, the meaning of words.
But let’s not forget that a word hasn’t got a
meaning given to it, as it were, by a power
independent of us, so that there could be a kind
of scientific investigation into what the word
really means. A word has the meaning someone
has given to it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein,  The Blue Book, in The
Blue and Brown, Books (1965),
Philosophers!
The obvious in spades!
Here's Ludwig:
Thus we may conceive how Words, which
were by Nature so well adapted to that purpose,
come to be made use of by Men, as the Signs of
their Ideas; not by any natural connection, that
ther is between particular articulate sounds,
and certain Ideas, for then there would be but
one Language amongst all Men; but by a volun-
tary Imposition, whereby such a Word is made
arbitrarily the mark of such an Idea. The use
then of Words, is to be sensible Marks of Ideas;
and the Ideas they stand for, are their proper
and immediate Signification.
John Locke, 1690, ‘Of Words or Language in
General’, in An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, II
And here's John Locke:
What does this mean?
What is going on?
What about that shirt?
and
the car signalling?
Over to you Sherlock
Elementary?
Surely?
You could not sleuth it because
the signs were too open and too
many and there was no context
and you didn't know what genre
you were in. Polyseimic that's the media studies word.
What if the picture was in black
and white?
Well?
"Folks" that was the word Bush did not mean to use c'os terrorists ain't folks, no sirre Bob. Wrong connotations is all
Anchorage
When ships ride at anchor the anchor stops them from drifting, just as text anchors the meaning of images or even voice overs the meaning of films.
Thus
The anchorage says :
This is Annette, Annette collects Barbie dolls . She currently owns sixty five dolls; her favourite is Barbie Piste with its yellow skis. Annette works part time in KFC.
signifier/signified
_______________________________
This is a signifier
_______________________________
_______________________________
This is a signifier
This is a signifier too
The plastic star bracelet is a signifier
but what is signified?
NOW
and this is the big one
who/what controls the meaning
of the bracelet or as
Emily might say:
What do you mean
who controls the meaning?
It does n't have to mean owt...

But of course it does
the bracelet will be meaning some thing, it can't help itself, it's a cultural artefact and that's a fact.

And for Susan and for all
conforming, non-conformist, conventional, convention breaking teens the sad fact is that

MEANINGS ARE MADE IN RECEPTION

and saying I did n't mean that
is useless 'cos others take away their own meanings.
Extract from T.S.Eliot's
"Lovesong of J. Arthur Rank"
Eliot pictured on the  right
was a great tatoo afficianado
"skinart", he called it, his relationship with
the Tango was more problematic.
connotation/s
connotation/s
connotation/s
a rose is a rose is a rose
if only..........
___________________________
What if you take away the bracelet?
What does absence mean?

Emily May you're no longer
wearin' that bracelet I gave you..

Heyup Tracy luv where's that bracelet
I bought thee on Batley market?
The meaning of a message is not fixed and absolute: it is produced by an interaction between the communicator, the recipient and the context. Furthermore, people differ in their sensitivity to meanings, especially if these are implied rather than unambiguously expressed. This responsiveness is related to personal and psychological factors as well as to experience and training.
    A group of psychologists were studying the effects of different types of music on the listener. They wanted to know if stirring marches really did quicken the heartbeat, and if soft, languorous pieces produced slower breathing and relaxation of tension. Their results were all that they could have hoped, with one marked exception: a man whose response to a brisk march from Carmen
was lethargic and bored. Their surprise was increased when they discovered that he was a music teacher, but this proved to be the key to the whole problem. A piano arrangement of this tune had been a test piece in an examination regularly taken by his
students; hearing it was sufficient to evoke excruciating hours
listening to the music being tortured by beginners. He understood the intended meaning of the piece, but was not able to respond in an appropriate manner because of the unpleasant memories which interfered with his hearing it.

Connotation and denotation

We give labels to things in order to classify them, to make
clearer the meaning we are trying to convey. In simple terms, if we wish to discuss a table it helps communication if we call it ‘table’ rather than ‘chair’ or ‘donkey’. If we have to teach our listeners new words every time we speak, our conversation becomes tiresomely didactic, so we build upon the language which they already possess - and the same is true of communication
through pictures or graphics. However, in using a
name or a label which our audience has used before, we evoke not only the meaning we intend but also a varying range of personal
Some wise words from John Morgan and Peter Whelton on this topic:
A most excellent book, full of good things and a model of clarity and sense

memories of other occasions when this word or label has been encountered. This distinction, between a label and the memories which it evokes, is the traditional one between denotation and
connotation.















    A photograph of my parents wedding
denotes them: they are unquestionably defined in the picture.

The connotations, on the other hand,
are stimulated by factors such as the viewer’s prior knowledge or experience of the characters portrayed.
For my mother the picture evokes many memories and
it is invariably a trigger for  much character deliniation, for me, her son, all the resonances are second hand and for most people "reading" this image the text must be "open" to speculation merely.


    





















A sign denotes that to which it explicitly refers.

The denotation of a word is what appears in the dictionary as a definition of the word.

Thedenotation of a road-sign is the explanation of its use provided by theHighway Code.

The connotations of a sign are the totality of recollections evoked by it;
they vary from person to person and tend to be emotional in character.
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