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Language, no more than a mobile army of metaphors

Edward Said quotes the following from Nietzsche, saying what is the truth of language but

...a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically.

And so, after long use they seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to people.

For Nietzsche language truths are illusions, which through use and the ensuing fossilisations one just accepts these metaphors and  anthropomorphisms as ongoing truths.

The truth is far more likely to they have been sheared or hewn off the rock of fact, by language, into common place usage.

So language might be viewed in Sausserian terms as:  " a differential system without positive terms".

 

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