How did the expression 'apple of my eye' come about?

Apple of one's eyes

THE “APPLE OF ONE’S EYES”

STUDY ON THE FORMING PROCESS OF CONNOTATIVE MEANING

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Recently, I watched a famous episode of the soap opera “Desperate Housewives.” The screenwriters stole a famous idea from the bible, which they exaggerated. As soon as Eve fetches an apple from the tree, Adam is crushed by a huge apple and buried in the ground. It seems that the object apple became a sort of burden and dangerous thing here, but we all know that apple represents the fruit of wisdom in the bible. Thus God forbade Adam and Eve to either touch or eat it by telling them that apple is poison. However, they still ate it and were enlightened to realize shame of being nude. Is that the magic from "apple"? Obviously, it is not.

Statement of Problem

Ordinarily, when somebody hears a person speak the word apple, probably an image of a red, round, small shape object comes to mind, and only then one may think of that as an edible fruit. Why do we have so many ideas as soon as the word apple stimulates our mind? Which was the first or original meaning of this word when it has been created? And how can it develop its connotative meaning after time? What is its basic entity and what have been added afterwards?

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of the study is to analyze the relationship between a word and its entities, especially its connotative entities. And with the theory of philosophy of language, the author hopes she can find a certain reason for that.

Significance of the Study

Currently, the field of linguistics not only researches traditional aspects of language like semantics, phonology, syntax, grammar, etc. It has started to cooperate with other fields, such as “Cognitive Science and Philosophy,” to expose the mystery of human language. For this reason, the author also wants to find a new way out besides the answers concluded by the other scholars. If she exposed the mystery of the connotative meaning of the word, she would find a way of language cognition.

Assumption

As humans use language, it kept changing. I have a bold supposition. Suppose that the word is person A, and the meaning of the word is person C, and between them is the double faced mirror B. They are standing on the same straight line, the image of C reflect through B to the body of A, while A sees its own image through B, and it gets the idea of C, that is its meaning. A--------------------------B--------------------------C.

Delimitation of the Study

This study is limited to sources which include highly recommended printed and non-printed sources suitable to the study of philosophy of language, particularly meaning and metaphor. This study will also be restricted to references located in the Karrmann Library at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, the library of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. However, the online sources were used if needed.

Methodology

A general review of the related literature in the area of selection and appropriate materials for meaning conducted. The findings will be summarized, conclusions were drawn, and recommendations will be made. A selected annotated bibliography of sources listing printed and non- printed materials about meaning compiled.

CHAPTER TWO

Review of Literature

“Philosopher John Stuart Mill was one of the earliest advocates of a direct reference theory of names, which claims that the meaning of an expression lies in what it points to in the world” (Direct reference theory). If we favor this idea, the word apple just simply points to the real object apple. William James said that “Some parts of the stream of feeling must be more intense . . . whereas lower animals simply react upon those more salient sensations by appropriate movements, higher animals remember them, and men react on them intellectually, by using nouns, adjectives, and verbs to identify them when they meet them elsewhere” (William 48). So that the word apple is the word to identify the same object apple when human sees it again and again. “On the contrary, philosopher Gottlob Frege favored the so-called Mediated Reference Theory, which is a semantic philosophy that posits that meanings reference something in the external world but are mediated by some other process” (Mediated reference theory).

“Bertrand Russell held that we could only be acquainted with our own sense data -- momentary perceptions of colors, sounds and the like  -- and that everything else, including the physical objects that these were sense data of, could only be inferred, or reasoned to -- i.e., known by description and known directly” (Epistemology). Thus, the frequency of the color “red” is very high for the word apple."

"George Moore said that for a person who knows a language, the meaning of a word is the concept or the notion he received as soon as he heard it. For a person who didn’t acquire the meaning of this language, to explain the meaning of a word is to awake the similar concept or notion from this person’s mind” (Moore 217). Thus, the time someone spends on hearing and reacts to the English word apple and the Chinese word pin guo will be the same on the condition that he knew those two languages.

“Louis Hjelmslev explored language’s special structure through the assistance of a completely formalized premise system, which denied the importance of language’s mobility in spite of admitting its mobility. He emphasized language’s stability and that this stability doesn’t root in a kind of 'existence' outside the language regardless of whether this existence is physical, biological, logical or ontological. For any language to be called a language it is because it is stable; it makes certain language is true to itself, no matter what shape it changed to” (Jiliang 121).

“However, Jacques Derrida thinks that because the structure of language is an ‘obturated and autonomic system’, it definitely has a center as structure’s organizer. It has an ontological point or a determinate ‘onto-’” (Jiliang 165).

“When he invented 'grammatology,' he thought that the letter is not simply a facsimile for each phoneme. We can’t have a definite meaning for a word before. First comes speaking, and then have the writing. In fact, the writing system has been gaining its meaning by recording the speaking language, so that the meaning can never come before it” (Jiliang 187).

“Meanwhile, he thinks that as supplement of language, the writing system exposes language’s innate and inherent imperfection. But in this process, the characteristics of a writing system’s supplement (externalism, visualization, conventionalism, adjunction or absence etc, which suffered condemnation) evolved into the essential principle of action of thinking” (Jiliang 189). The meaning of the word is always confusing, thus Wittgenstein wrote “All philosophy is a ‘critique of language’” (Wittgenstein 37). He also held that the structure of the language reflects the structure of language. In a word, each of the attributes of the language mirrors a counterpart of reality. If you can’t figure out what something really means, you will fail to know the object or concept and cut your connection to reality. I argue that the problem I will discuss here doesn’t belong to problems of etymology anymore.

First, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word apple is “a generic term for all fruit, other than berries but including nuts, as late as 17 century. Hence, people use it to refer to the unnamed 'fruit of the forbidden tree' in Genesis” (Etymology). I think that this is its first recorded appearance to represent the meaning other than the fruit apple. If I borrowed Semiotist Umberto Eco’s Theory of Semiotics (Eco 50), the word apple is the expression while those different kinds of meaning are the content of the word apple refers to. The meaning of fruit is the lowest level that the meaning or you can also call it as denotative meaning, while the metaphorical meaning “treasure or sin or fruit of forbidden tree” belongs to the higher level or the connotative meaning.

The word apple refers to the object apple but the meaning of it was attached by the human. Let us see how to relate the lower level’s meaning with the higher level’s meaning. According to Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, first the lower level of meaning is “the fleshy usu. rounded and red and yellow edible pome fruit of a tree (genus Malus) of the rose family; also: an apple tree” (Webster 97). The entity we will analyze here is red, although the study on “color” is another way of studying human cognition. Besides using it as an attribute to the word apple, the entity red also can attribute to words “fire, blood,” or phrase “communist country.” Thus, the entity red also has the meaning of “fearing, dangerous, to keep away from.”

The two following paragraphs are from Sterling A. Leonard’s article The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth Century Language Theories. The first one will support the idea of above paragraph. 1. “Words then are the names of particular ideas, and are consequently as various in their structure, as the ideas themselves. Willich, Philological Essays, 1798, pp.xciv-v.”(Hayden 30) Although the idea from the entity red is just part of the idea of the object apple, the idea of the word apple can be interpreted as a dangerous seduction that will lead to a bad result from one aspect. My explanation is as follows.

Fleshy—seductive, lure, because it has the meaning of “Sensual appetites” Round--- it is just an objective description of the shape Red---dangerous, fear and awe. Yellow…tree----natural characteristics of apple 2. “Words must be joined together according to the nature of the things they stand for. Monboddo, Origin and Process, 1773 (II, 343).” (Hayden 30). Thus, the entities themselves or the meaning of the words “fleshy, round, red, yellow” have been joined together to define the word apple according to the nature of the object apple they stand for. Because the entities for “fleshy, red…” “seductive, lure, dangerous” also indicate to attract people’s attention to the idea or the object they attribute to at the same time. Furthermore, this explanation can also be applied to the formation of the idiom “apple of one’s eye.” For instance, there is another idiom “catch someone’s eye” under the word eye, which refers to something really amazing and attractive that one needs to pay attention to. So that the word eye also owns the entity of attractive as well as the word apple does. Eventually, the nature of the word apple and the word eye connect these two unrelated words to express the idea of “One that is treasured.”

CHAPTER THREE

Conclusion

From the above statement, we can see that it is the combination of each attribute’s meaning that determines the meaning of the idiom. And it is the way that individual words that seem not related by meaning can be connected together. Furthermore, on the one hand, each attribute for each word is invented by humans time after time. Every time humans realize an attribute of a concrete thing, then, they will add it to the word that refers to the object in reality. On the other hand, those attributes are reified by the real object.

References Brightman, E., An Introduction to Philosophy. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1925.

Cashell, K. (n.d.), Attempt to Understand Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory of the Proposition. 15 Dec. 2005, http://swww.dynu.net/samples/index.html.

"Direct reference theory", Direct Reference Theory, Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia. 24 Mar. 2006, 29 Mar. 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_reference_theory.

Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.

“Epistemology, Bertrand Russell”, Bertrand Russell, Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia. 10 April 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell.

G. E. Moore, Some Main Problems of Philosophy. New York: Collier Books, 1962.

Hayden. D.E. P, Worth A., and Tate G. Classics in Linguistics. New York: Philosophical Library, 1967.

Jiliang Tu, A comparative study of contemporary western philosophy of Language, Beijing: Chinese Social Science Press, 1996.

“Mediated Reference Theory.” 01 Feb. 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediated reference theory.

Online Etymology Dictionary. 28 Mar. 2006, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=apple&searchmode=none.

Wardell, R., First Lessons in Philosophy. 2nd ed., London: Charles H. Kelly, 1911.

Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield: Merriam-Webster INC., 1987.

William. James, Some Problems of Philosophy---A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968.

Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus Llogico-Philosophicus: the German text of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Logisch-philosophische abhandlung with a new translation by d.f.pears and b.f.mcguinness and with the introduction by Bertrand Russell., London: Routlede & Kegan Paul, 1961.

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