The word in language is half someone else’s… it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.
Interpretation
Language is shaped by others' perspectives and intentions, and we must personalize it to give it our unique meaning.
This quote by Mikhail Bakhtin emphasizes the idea that language is inherently social and constructed through interactions with others. The words we use are not just personal expressions but are influenced by the words of others, their contexts, and their purposes. To truly own our language, we must adapt and internalize these words, transforming them to reflect our own identities and intentions.
In practice
This quote can be used in a linguistic seminar to illustrate the social nature of language.
The catharsis that finalizes Dostoevsky's novels might be - of course inadequately and somewhat rationalistically - expressed in this way: nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future
In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others.
Words belong to nobody, and in themselves they evaluate nothing. But they can serve any speaker and be used for the most varied and directly contradictory evaluations on the part of the speakers.
There is nothing wrong with being well off as long as money has a social and ethical value and is not the object of one's own greed.
Wouldst thou know thyself, observe the actions of others._x000D_ _x000D_ Wouldst thou other men know, look thou within thine own heart.
One of the most important misunderstandings for white people to get over to move forward is this idea that racism is a good-bad proposition - that if we're good we can't be part of it, that being uncomfortable means you're a terrible person. We have to let go of that and understand it as a system we all live in.
We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe.
All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.
I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.