Our Retired Explorer (dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961)

Because I'm feeling a little academic, I'm going to try to explain semiotics. I spent four years trying to understand what exactly semiotics is, and in the end the best explanation (that wasn't 200 pages long) was the one given by my high school philosophy teacher. "Semiotics," he said, "is the study of the science of signs."

A sign, according to Umberto Eco, is anything that can be used to lie. In it's simplest form, a sign has two parts: the signifier and the signified (note to the real academics out there, I'm explain Saussure's theory of semiotics. I've always liked it better, so I'm not going near Pierce's semiotics with a ten-foot pole). The signifier is the physical part of the sign (the acoustic sound, the configuration of letters on a page to form words, etc.) while the signified is the mental aspect, or the idea. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. This is key. There is no necessary relationship between the word tree and the idea of a tree. This, according to some, is a socially constructed relationship.

Semiotics has been applied to linguistics, philosophy, literary criticism, anthropology, cinema studies, and history. It's wide appeal is specifically because it's a methodology and not a discipline in the strictest sense. Semiotics is a little out of fashion these days, but it'll make a come back some day. Until then, I feel okay with the fact that tons of hipsters in Toronto have also taken these courses, and therefore are trying to apply what they know to being cool (while I, on the other hand, am concerned only with sleeping peacefully at night).

Now if anyone asks me what semiotics is I can just send them a link to this post.