B

B

A "lip-activated" sound. This generally makes it mildly pleasurable and endows it with a directional "neutrality,"  propelling sound out or pushing it back in depending on what precedes and/or follows it..

 "bill," "Bill"

The first thing one notices when closely focusing on saying the word “bill” (water bill, electric bill, etc.) is that, comparatively,  the ba in ba-i-ll takes longer to say than the h in h-ill. The bi sound lacks either the flow through or the push of the hi, mainly because saying  the “b” here is essentially the same as if one were saying ba (short a). This seemingly insignificant slight pause, however, makes all the difference in the world on the micro-affective level, because it suspends the short i sound just enough in body-sense time to isolate it again viz its relation to the much bigger, stronger, upwardly sloping l sound it’s about to run into. Thus, instead of the h and i forming something of a collaboration, the h pushing, the i adding pleasurable motivation in order to tackle the “l,” what you get here is the ba sound (a “naked” generic pushing sound itself, but one that can subsequently go in practically any direction, depending on what follows it, e.g., b-ottom, b-unk, below; or what precedes and follows it, e.g. above.

There's much more on the b of course, but that’s enough on it generally for now, since we are still trying to focus on it as it functions here pitted against the relatively isolated and thus (as usual) discomforting sound, “ill.”  This sort of contextualization works well, we might soon perceive, as a good biosemantic analog for someone struggling to “pay a bill.” To further illustrate the this point, the phrase “someone struggles to pay a bill” can be seen as somewhat redundant in the same way our saying “oh, look a hill” might be, since arguably, both "bill" and "hill," micro-aflfectively, already say what they mean. (That is, somatically and bioenergetically, subliminally, probably in the microsecond before the indexical and cognitive apperception of thing, bill, or hill, has even occurred.). More to the immediate point, the “ill” in bill and the “ill” in hill convey a different body sense at a subliminal level. Of course might choose to equalize the effect (affect) somewhat by tacking on adjectives—“That’s an easy bill to pay,”  or “that’s a hard hill to climb,” but all else being equal (the rich and the lame need not apply here), taken naked, most of us would pick the hill over the bill any time.

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But what happens if we move from the common noun “bill” to the proper noun, “Bill?”

Doesn’t the very existence of this very popular name seem to run counter to our assumptions? Why would people pick a name for their children, or nickname for themselves, whose sound was discomforting? On the surface, at least, this would seem another good example backing up the conventional idea of  language construction as purely arbitrary, or socially constructed, with no significant underlying physiological or predictable affective aspect.

But wait a minute. Isn't one of the primary characteristics of the living creatures to whom we give names like this  their role as originators and recipients of action out in the real world. In the course of normal social and cultural activities, I might be able to pay my bill , but sometimes I could  just be paying Bill. Conversely, Bill can also pay, or choose not to , a bill  he owes to me; A bill, however,can’t really pay a bill,* or Bill, nor anything, for that matter. Many inanimate objects do move, seemingly all by themselves, in real space and time, like automobiles, heating systems, and computer motors. But we generally assume that most if not all of the actions they carry out require the agency of living beings, and usually human beings. In short, a "Bill" exists and functions in the world in a dramatically different way than a "bill" does. Bill exists in cultural space, a bill does not (yes, yes, a bill can catalyze action, but this still requires Bill to finally pay it, be presented with it, refuse to pay it, or at least just program the computer or deliver the mail that announces the bill has arrived or is due.

So before we discount our bioenergetic theory purely on the basis of an assumption that the general affective impact of bill and Bill will be the same, we first have to look at the influence this added cultural dimension has upon our sense interpretation, and evaluation of the word and its sound.

Anyone familiar with our culture knows the importance we put on people’s being to deal successfully, and on a regular basis, with life’s unpleasantness and challenges. When in the unlikely event  we encounter a woman named Bill, it tends to surprise us. If asked why, we might well say, because Bill is a man’s name, or a masculine name. Proponents of language-as-a-purely-social-construction might now say, well, this is just because we are used to the convention of men being called Bill and women not. But hasn't been traditionally a central role of men in our culture to protect, to go out and fight--in other words to deal on a regular basis with life's unpleasant aspects whenever they may come up? And although, certainly, exceptional women throughout our history have done the same, and that is has never been truer than today, a girl named Bill ("Sue" we can discuss another time) still, on a not-so-subliminal level, still tends to run against the grain of that sort of culturally-based gender stereotyping.

Remember how our analysis of the word's sound showed it to be a microcosm, in a bioenergetic sense, of the word’s meaning? After a momentary pause, indicating effort, work, or struggle, the “ba” stands up to the “ill.” Baàill. Now just add to this analysis the cultural status of “originator or recipient of actions out in the world” that we do, cleartly, associate  for the most part exclusively with human beings, and you’ve still got a solid, and thus credible, affective microcosm of “that guy 'Biil,'” hard-working, dependable, and effective.  If this weren’t true, would the assignment of the same name to a woman so readily alter our immediate cultural sense of that woman’s character, with reference to all these aspects? Such a shift in our perception or sense of what a woman’s character might be like, just upon hearing her unusual (“for a woman”) name can not be nearly as easily explained by the notion of social convention. My reaction to hearing that the nice lady delivering the mail is named “Bill” may include the idea that this is a strange and unusual name for her, but it is just as likely make me think of her, if only temporarily, as a potentially more hard-working, dependable and effective person than I did a minute ago. **

Alright, let’s say we have now met the challenge posed to the validity of our word analysis theory by the question, “How could a name that includes a feeling of discomfort become so popular?” by answering it with “Well, when contexted culturally, the action bioenergetically performed on that discomforting sound actually transforms into a feeling of security.” And to the extent the person is actually deemed to “live up” to the name, the corresponding social and psychological interactions can ramp that effect up quite a bit: even to the point of allusions to the person in question as “Bill our savior,” or “Bill, Mr.Reliable. Our idiosyncratic elaborations on (relatively) basic sensory effects can take our use of names in relation to specific people far from the their original "meaning," even while still fundamentally resting on it.***

*Is this just the “difference” between the sound of “bill” and the sound of “a bill”? No. Articles actually play a surprisingly major bioenergetic role in  language, but that is another subject.

**Now, all of this discounts the more personal associations one might have with the name Bill, or for that matter any name. But that is a whole other discussion; for the purposes of this one, we assume an “all other things being equal” point of view.

***This kind of phemonenon also arguably sheds some light on why this kind of  “system” of naming can work so well within specific cultural contexts. With it, even though you have three or four “Bills” in the same room, you might be able to distinguish immediately them, not only by looking at them, but by the tone a speaker uses to refer to them—so long as you “know” each of them.

ban

baby