Posted: Apr 20, 2019 7:50 am
surreptitious57 wrote:The cultureless james needs to realise that he is using language to convince everyone of his unique culturelessness
And yet he doesnt realise that language is one of the most potent symbols of culture and is universal to all of them
Yep, that's one of the many amusingly self-contradictory components.
In the same vein...
I reside within the same boat...
jamest lives on the ocean? He's a sailor? Both he and Cito are sailors, on the same vessel, in the same body of water?
Wait, it's a metaphorical boat, you say? Well, that is odd for someone so free of culture to be using metaphors which just so happen to be the kind of metaphor one might expect to arise in an island nation. You won't find that metaphor in all other languages, particularly those which inhabit mountains or vast plains where boats don't traditionally exist and therefore aren't traditionally employed in culturally loaded significant exchanges.
Oh, but he was just using it to communicate? Funny, because that's also what culture is - a shared system of meaning, a pool of symbolic references on which to draw to help elucidate (and sometimes constrain) thoughts and to facilitate and enrich an exchange of ideas by using notional analogies inherently and unquestioningly shared by all members of that culture, in this case, even those who have never been on a boat.
It's lucky jamest is on that boat, because he's way out of his depth here. Ooh extended analogy! I is cultured!