Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and
easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated
– overpopulated – with the intentions of others. Expropriating I, forcing it to
submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated
process.... As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot
opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline
between oneself and the other... The word in language is half someone else's.
It becomes one’s "own" only when the speaker populates it with his
own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to
his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of
appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it
is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but
rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving
other people's intentions; it is from there that one must take the word, and
make it one's own.
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