Album: 69 Love Songs
Year: 1999
Since Ferdinand De Saussure died in 1913, the murder confessed to in the amazing second verse of this song probably didn’t happen.
He was a linguist who was a great contributor to what is called semiotics which — I think, cos I’m trying to boil this down from several wiki articles — is all about the relationship between a word (the signifier) and what it means (the signified). In Saussure’s mind, that relationship was completely arbitrary.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1080: The Magnetic Fields – “The Death of Ferdinand De Saussure”