“I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes,” said third-year Literature/Writing major Ace Bassington.
Photo by Liv Gilbert
Literature major Earnest Bytheway has reportedly mistaken the sign for the signified. Witnesses state that, while standing at a bus stop on Tuesday morning, he said, “I feel a sense of relief and well-being; the bus must be here.” Upon being told by his roommate, Lisa Smithereens, that the “meaning in his mind, the signified” is not equivalent to “the presence of the object, the sign,” Bytheway immediately went home and currently refuses to leave the house.
Bytheway’s roommate Gertie Bowls has spent the last month fielding questions from experts in every field, but has since stopped talking to anyone other than her parents after also confusing the sign for the signified. “I don’t know why this is a big deal,” Smithereens said to Bowls in a phone call shortly before her own self-imposed isolation. “I feel things in response to fabricated stimuli all the time. Like, I see a photo of the moon and I feel the same sense of awe and wonder as I do looking at the moon itself, as similar as any two feelings separated by space and time can be.” At this, Bytheway’s roommate Gabi Jenkins was heard shouting in the same room, “That’s what I’ve been saying!” before the line abruptly went dead. Bytheway’s roommate Megan Bateman could not comment definitively whether Smithereens herself ended the call or if Smithereens’ “zest for the real” had “died so hard” that their apartment’s landline short-circuited.
Bytheway’s roommate Nathan Crane was seen in his literature class the following day, but did not comment about the events in his apartment. However, when called on in class to explain the difference between the sign and the signified, he said, “I don’t wanna deflect, but how do we know the sign exists if all we can know is the signified?” Crane then went home, he claimed, “because the weight of the veil between me and the fiction of the tangible world made it impossible for me to greet my friends with my usual wink and a ‘How’s it going, champ?’”
Their isolation has impacted life at home. “The only reason our living situation worked was because each of us was home only during 8-hour shifts,” said Norman Borman, Bytheway’s roommate.
Their performance in class has also suffered. “I’m sorry, but this all stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of semiotics,” commented their professor Liable Knockfeld. “And mistakes aren’t a big deal. Go to the beach or something if you’re this stressed out by the quarter system.”
“It’s not that simple,” said Bytheway’s roommate Vanity Care, who went home after giving this statement: “Earnest fears that others will make the same mistake and confuse the Earnest in their minds for reality, which will mean that the reality of Earnest will meld with others’ perceptions of him. Thus we all refuse to exist in any form other than speculation — pure signification.”
