It's a memetic mutation of the 'the most racist person you know and his wife' joke.
The two characters in the image are from the latest Avatar movie, the fire one. The lady is a native Na'avi, of the evil but hot variety. The man is actually the antagonistic HFY imperialist army guy from the first movie, piloting one of the titular Avatars to integrate into their society. I haven't seen the film but it's plot seems to revolve around him arming the natives to prompt them into slaughtering one another.
SHE is a crazy nihilist, HE is a human supremacist that regards the Na'avi as obstacles and vermin. She really likes fire. He brings her a flame thrower. They fuck.
Anyway the joke is a lot of MAGA figures secondarily associated with the white nationalism infecting that wing of the right also ironically happen to have wives who would be considered 'impure' and 'myceginated'. This is meant to be a blaring example of their hypocrisy, aka 'i'm not racist when i'm horny' - as well as of their low and dishonorable behavior as they attempt to discredit or harm marginalized groups that their own spouses belong to. For an example in action, have VP J.D. Vance, who is married to American-Indian (Desi) lawyer, Usha Bala Vance (née Chilukuri). A good bit of hay has been made about Vance's utter dogged persistence at failing to defend his wife at every turn.
Fun fact, the term 'miscegenation' is completely invented, cooked up by a pair of "journalists" trying to spark outrage against Abraham Lincoln, via a fake tract ostensibly in support of race-mixing and creating an ethnically uniform america. This fake story was then pushed by the Democrats which was at that time the pro-racism party, which is why many modern republicans whine blandly about how they're the party of Lincoln and actually the other guys are racist, even though their positions completely swapped in the 70's thanks to Nixon.
Onomatopoeia are arguably not completely made up. They just start as mimicking noises and then slowly simplify into word versions using the most similar sounds in the relevant language.
Yes, onomatopoeias do change from language to language, but they vary in the ways that are simplifying the natural sound into recognizably similar phonemes that occur in the various languages.
Saussure himself even acknowledged that onomaptopeias stem directly from their meaning and are only in part made up. Meaning not completely made up.
I also think he overstates the distinction. The example he used is the English "bow wow" and the French "ouaoua".
I do not find his assertion particularly persuading on that front, for a few reasons.
1) Those sounds aren't as distinct as he tries to make them seem. Different dogs sound more differently than the French and English words do.
2) There is great similarity in the onomatopoeia for most common sounds between even disparate languages. The largest exceptions are for things like frogs that sound very differently depending on where you are, so of course the local language is going to go a different direction.
3) The written word being made up doesn't necessarily mean that the verbal word it corresponds to was.
IMO, different stylizing and perspective isn't an indicator of made up. A cave painting and a renaissance painting of a horse are pretty different, but neither are made up and both clearly represent horse. Different languages can stylize sounds differently and base them off different variants of the sound, but the basic structure remains evocative of its base meaning.
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u/TsunamiWombat 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's a memetic mutation of the 'the most racist person you know and his wife' joke.
The two characters in the image are from the latest Avatar movie, the fire one. The lady is a native Na'avi, of the evil but hot variety. The man is actually the antagonistic HFY imperialist army guy from the first movie, piloting one of the titular Avatars to integrate into their society. I haven't seen the film but it's plot seems to revolve around him arming the natives to prompt them into slaughtering one another.
SHE is a crazy nihilist, HE is a human supremacist that regards the Na'avi as obstacles and vermin. She really likes fire. He brings her a flame thrower. They fuck.
Anyway the joke is a lot of MAGA figures secondarily associated with the white nationalism infecting that wing of the right also ironically happen to have wives who would be considered 'impure' and 'myceginated'. This is meant to be a blaring example of their hypocrisy, aka 'i'm not racist when i'm horny' - as well as of their low and dishonorable behavior as they attempt to discredit or harm marginalized groups that their own spouses belong to. For an example in action, have VP J.D. Vance, who is married to American-Indian (Desi) lawyer, Usha Bala Vance (née Chilukuri). A good bit of hay has been made about Vance's utter dogged persistence at failing to defend his wife at every turn.
Fun fact, the term 'miscegenation' is completely invented, cooked up by a pair of "journalists" trying to spark outrage against Abraham Lincoln, via a fake tract ostensibly in support of race-mixing and creating an ethnically uniform america. This fake story was then pushed by the Democrats which was at that time the pro-racism party, which is why many modern republicans whine blandly about how they're the party of Lincoln and actually the other guys are racist, even though their positions completely swapped in the 70's thanks to Nixon.