Has Anyone in This Family Ever Even Seen A Chicken?

Chicken! The word read out loud or to ones self brings an array or signified (conceptual) images to the head. Maybe a white chicken in a farm, or a chicken on a plate you're about to eat. Maybe even an egg.

Or if you're in the Bluth family, you've never even seen a chicken

 Ferdinand de Saussure laid it down pretty simply: either the the sound of the word (a signifier) brings up an image to mind or a picture brings to mind the word (signified). Both concepts together form a "Sign."
That's fairly simple to grasp. Complications do in fact arise as Saussure expected to. "This conception is open to criticism at several points. It assumes that ready-made ideas exist before words..." In other words, does something exist if we do not have a word for it. Is a tree a tree if we have nothing for it. This is similar to "if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it does it still make a sound.
For example, in Africa there use to be a legend of a human/monkey hybrid that would come from the mountains to kidnap humans to eat. It was rarely seen, but when it was, it was a ferocious and carnivorous creature the natives called "ngila."Of course they turned out to not be just things of myths and legends. These creatures do in fact exists. We just know them now as silverback gorillas. 

Ngila

 

Now we may poke fun, now, since we know that A) gorillas are not fierce by nature unless provoked and B) they are herbivores. Yet, were gorillas real before we gave them the name "gorilla?" That all depends on your personal opinion. Yes, they physically were there, hidden from all human knowledge, but could one say they knew they existed if they didn't have a name? The described "ngila" is hardly a gorilla.
This brings us to the first principle, "the principle between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary." The example of the gorilla all but proves this correct. The way I remember learning this principle was we know something is something by what it is not. Though this too can get confusing.

A mass of people amass at Sunday Mass

 

 About 70 years after Saussure  thought up this correlation of signifier and signified = sign, a Frenchman by the name of Jacques Derrida decided to rain on his parade. He called this spoiler of ideas "differance" just so he could mess with people even more. The idea is "differance ,ore properly refers to what in classical language would be called the origin oe production of differences and teh differences of differences." With this idea, Derrida basically said one cannot fully mean what they mean since what they mean always relies on what they do not mean and since what they do not mean is infinite from what they do mean, the meaning ultimately goes on ad infinitum according to what it does not mean.

A confused ngila

 

  Derrida specifically chose difference (but with an "a") since that word itself is "referring to differing, both as spacing/temporalizing and as the movement that structures every dissociation." He really wanted to bring his point home by making difference and differance homonyms thus showing that the word does not, and cannot always bring up the purposed signified as Saussure said. One would only be able to tell if they were reading it and physically seeing the word written down which would make it work only as a signified and not as a signifier.
Derrida may have stunned the world with this idea, but I still think Saussure had a point. Despite the instability of Saussure's definition according to Derrida, I believe it still works. Yes, a word is very limited and so is it's idea. For instance, the onomatopeia for a rooster crowing in English is "cock-a-doodle doo." It sounds natural since if you are reading this, I will presume you are English-speaking. In Nepal this same sound is "frooti-tooti tu." In Armenia it is "tsoo-ghoo-roo-ghoo."
Language itself is very unstable and Saussure had his fault in trying to oversimplify it, but it works for beginners. Derrida wanted to master language and thus his idea doesn't fly completely over my head, but is harder to grasp without simplifying it.  Whether we are trying to conceptualize an ape, a rooster's sound or what a chicken is, it is varied since we all have different ideas, despite speaking the same language.