sardine post lecture 8/29 RE: de Saussure

As a child, I once lived in an area north of Chicago where most sentences were punctuated with “Ya hey.” A good number of families were composed of recent immigrants from Scandinavia and Germany. Many kids were bilingual. My own father forgot the language but still swore in German; the words carried more validity.

Recently, my neighbor’s daughter started taking German in school. Her mother and I are friends, and she wasn’t upset when I offered to teach her daughter what every kid wants to learn first. I don’t remember that much. But I know a few words. And then I got to this one word, and we got stuck. The term was schneebronzer. A schneebronzer refers to a most-likely male individual who writes his name in the snow. He bronzes the snow. For example, we would say, “He’s a real schneebronzer.”

However, I finally realized my friend and her daughter had never seen snow. Schneebronzer made absolutely no sense to them. Snow is an abstract concept in Florida. It is part of the langue, but the parole. The word carries no validity. No strength. The community of Florida has shaped the language. It doesn’t matter that where I used to live we used the word in the summer, and the word didn’t really refer to snow or the act of bronzing it. It referred to the individual’s character and personality. Schneebronzer conveys no meaning in Florida. It is untranslatable. Floridians get lost on “snow.”