Just to continue to elaborate on Kelsey's response, one of my favorite songs last year, called 5 Years Time by Noah and the Whale was purchased by Saturn and used in a commercial for the Saturn Vue. If you watch Project Runway, or the Bravo network at all, you heard this commercial at least 17 times an hour. Sarcastically, whenever I played it on air, I'd refer to it as the Saturn Vue commercial rather than it's name. More people would recognize it that way anyways. The trace became more powerful than the song itself.
I am having difficulties with the idea that the word is God. There was life before speech. How about animals with no means of language? Have they reached a state of Ur? I disagree, animals still are no closer to discerning the ultimate truth without language than we are with it. They cannot communicate their biases, but they still have them. A monkey is intelligent enough to hold vendettas against other monkeys. It can see the world differently than the monkey standing next to it.
Does a virus understand the ultimate meaning? Does a plankton? A jellyfish? Or is it only humans who can try to conceive the "ultimate truth"?
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In response to this post, I also question the statement, “The word is God.” We have gone over this several times during the course of the past semester. The existence and definition of “God” is debatable, but with the general notion of a worldly creator and the reason of life’s subsistence, it is not the word would be God, but thought and communication. Although in previous classes we have learned “thought is a vague, uncharted nebula” without language, the concept of the spoken and written forms of communication as the sole definition of “language” is incorrect. Language could be considered any form of communication—consequently, this also means other forms of sound (screams, cries, laughter, etc.) and physical techniques. Thus, before humans, before the spoken and written traditional languages, there was still avid communication.
This post instantly reminded me of whale mating cries and dolphin “click” and “whine” call communications. Although it is not considered “language,” and is uninterruptable to humans, the calls are a form of communication between the animals. These animals existed well before the human conception of “God” began to circulate the globe. The animal forms of communication call into question all aspects of what we “know” about our language—perhaps some signifiers are intrinsic to our being. A certain pitch of scream is universally held to mean something of a dangerous or cry of fear. Even other creatures, such as dogs are apt to understand this. Or a whimper—always, regardless of culture or spoken language, relates to a feeling of sadness, pain, or disappointment, etc. As with the lack of communication of biases, I think that monkeys, and all animals for that matter, certainly can hold grudges, and they can also communicate them through cries and physical actions.
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