What I derived from Derrida....

Derrida, in Diffrance, makes the point that language is, in a sense, arbitrary. I have thought about this before, about how the English language could be made more efficient and easy-to-use through elimination of silent letters, and even elimination of entire letters, namely the letter C. (Using "K" in words like cannot and using "S" in words like essence.) I believe these observations are quite poignant because as English speakers, we don't think about the language nearly as much as we should. It is a system decided upon long, long ago and left unchanged (yet not left unaugmented) for the future generations not to alter due to the risk of looking like an illiterate erratic. Words do change, however, but the system of letters is one that takes a lot longer to change, spanning multiple generations.

In relation to Locke, I believe the two ideas can exist simultaneously. While Locke was right that clarity in language is the goal of the speaker, it doesn't look like the system is currently set up to provide the most clarity to the most amount of people. I have heard that the German language is a lot more logical and doesn't have the hidden landmines of false sounds and letters attributed to it like the English language. Yet, English is more widely spoken around the world. I wonder if there is something about the English language that made it that way or whether it is the distribution of English-speaking people that simply brought the English language along with them.

Derrida also goes into a context-heavy theory about language where his goal of clarity was somewhat a failure. In the sense of clarity, it's almost a given that the author writing a paper about the necessity of clarity in text would be more clear than an author writing about the arbitrary and fickle nature of language. A point about Derrida that I like is that a word's entire meaning can be changed simply through the alteration of one letter. One letter is all it takes for the word "bad" to be the word "bed", and one is a mode and the other is an object: two completely different things being pointed at by a slightly different signifier. Furthermore, I loved the example he makes with the words different meaning a binary opposition and difference meaning similar yet opposing in a singular thing. The human system of language is fascinating.