coolbeans, Macherey

Macherey states that speech consists of the spoken and the unspoken. He states that silences shape all of speech. The spoken is what we actually say versus the unspoken which is what we mean by saying something. I take this to mean that what we say and what is implied by what we say can have two different meanings. There are many examples of this in society today as well as the media and pop culture. We as a society tend to say things just to say them. For example, when people write “haha” in a text message are they really laughing? Sometimes we just do these things to respond in some way even though what we say isn’t truly what we mean. Another example, is if someone asks, “how was your day/weekend etc…?” and we respond with, “It was good.” We say that the weekend was good but fail to speak of what was good about it. Saying that the weekend was good is what we speak of, but the unspoken are the events of the weekend that made it good. An example of spoken versus unspoken that has become popular through the movie mean girls is the scene when Regina George tells a girl that her skirt is nice. The girl says thank you and Regina turns around to Kady and says, “that is the ugliest skirt that I have ever seen in my life”. Regina told the girl that her skirt was cute but what she really meant was that she was just complimenting her even though she thought the skirt was ugly.

On a funny note, http://www.collegehumor.com/article:1765288 here is a post on collegehumor.com entitled Thanksgiving Translated. It has some funny examples of what some people might say during a Thanksgiving dinner and what they actually mean when they say it.