"We Don't Know Anything, We Are Nothing, Without Meaning"

“You can’t use a bulldozer to study orchids” exemplifies Saussure’s ideal that language is arbitrary. Saussure explains that, “the patterns and functions of language in use today depends on the emphasis on how meanings are maintained and established and how language functions in a grammatical structure.” In the lyrics of this song the meaning of the word love is illusive. A later mention of the group Holland-Doizer-Holland provides a particular definition to the word love. Holland-Doizer-Holland was a group that composed over 200 Motown hits, their favorite song topic of course being love. Just as Saussure says the meaning of a word depends on its relationship with other words you associate with it at the given time. The group outlined two main interpretations of what love means by pairing the word love with dissimilar words.
Take the song “Ain’t To Proud To Beg” by the Temptations for example. The writer’s link words like begging, pleading, and leaving with the overall theme of love. Listeners immediately link the concept of love with definitions of heartbreak, loss, and pain. While on the other hand their song “Baby Love” associates words like “sugar pie” and “honey bunch,” two words that we immediately link to desserts and flavors we tend to find enjoyable. While the first song leaves reminisces of misfortune and sorrow in regards to love, the other defines love as a longing and of something desirable.
Saussure’s mention in the song complicates this binary idea of love as something good or something evil. Structuralism points out that the meaning of the word love, or any word that remains in its own seclusion, will always be unstable. The word love standing on it’s own therefore meanings nothing at all. Each individual will integrate meaning to the word depending on previous context that they have instilled into the words meaning. This could be hearing that word in songs, seeing it portrayed on film, or from personal experiences one incorporates into its meaning.
The lyric “You can’t use a bulldozer to study orchids,” may stand to challenge the idea that language is not contained within the object but rather is associated with it. Perhaps Saussure is suggesting that you can’t use literary theory that deconstructs the educationally implied concept of meaning to study language. The only way that we as educated literary critics can analyze language and the use of language within these theories is to use the meanings that we have established to each word through it’s unique and random place within context. “You can’t use a bulldozer to study orchids,” plays with the illusive meaning of words in context that individuals may not normally recognize, though the meaning is implicit to the reader or in this case to it’s listener. It also implies through the previous lyrics, “no understanding, no closure, it is a nemesis,” that language is inescapable and forever. There is no outside of language and the structure of meaning because nothing can be understood without it. It would therefore be impossible to use anything but language to study language and meaning.

-Adrienne