Bread drift

Imagine you’re out in the countryside, surrounded by tall, swaying grass like something from The Sound of Music. Birds are chirping, the wind is slow and lazy across your skin, and miraculously your hay fever isn’t turning you into a weezing 1920s coal worker. It’s perfect. So perfect that you launch your drone into the sky, just to see the whole field from above.

It ascends into the sky like Christ on a cloud—50 metres, 100 metres, higher and higher. But then it starts to glitch. The signal weakens. The drone becomes erratic, delayed, unreliable. The further it drifts from your controller, the less it listens. Left, right, up, down—those meanings blur. It’s not that the drone has become autonomous. It’s just that your grip on it is no longer direct.

But it’s not just drones that drift, it’s what language does too.

We often assume that words are like drones on short leashes—neatly tethered to the things they describe. More specifically, we assume a fixed relationship between a signifier (the word) and the signified (the concept). That when we say freedom or love, we imagine the word hovers just above the real thing, capturing it clearly. But language doesn’t work that way.

The French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida shows us that the connection between a word and what it means isn’t natural. It’s arbitrary. Fragile. Prone to drift. The further we zoom out, the more unstable that connection becomes. Like the drone drifting out of range, meaning begins to wobble. When we speak, we’re launching symbols into the air hoping they’ll land close to what we meant. Sometimes they do. Often, they don’t. And yet we keep talking.

This is why etymology is so seductive. If you believe that words are anchored—if you think there’s a “real” meaning at the root—then tracing a word’s origin feels like rewinding to a moment of clarity. You imagine that by understanding where a word comes from, you’ll understand what it really means. (What is a man? What is a women?) You might even feel like you’re getting closer to the truth. Closer to the real.

But that’s a trap.

Derrida calls this the metaphysics of presence: the idea that meaning lives closer to some original source. We privilege the “first” metaphor, the “root” word, the untainted form, because we associate truth with immediacy. We do this with speech over writing, sight over sound, clarity over ambiguity. Take something we all know and love: bread.

You’d like to think you know what bread is. But do you? Do you really? Is a baguette bread? Is a pita? A tortilla? What if you don’t use yeast? What if it’s round? What if it’s fried? The word “bread” is doing a lot of work. So is brot. And pain. And roti. And bun, roll, toast, bap. Or when does bread become toast? Was toast inside the bread all along, just waiting to be liberated—on a journey to its true, authentic self as toast?

These words all gesture toward a concept, but the concept itself isn’t stable. There’s no Platonic ideal of bread we can point to. It’s not “bread” because of some inner breadness. It’s bread because enough people keep using that sound to gesture toward enough similar floury things.

And on the flip side, there’s blue.

Blue only gets one word. Despite the infinite shades of blue, we cram it all into a single label. We could have 10,000 words for blue—but we don’t. Meanwhile, we slice bread into a dozen linguistic slices. That arbitrariness should give us pause.

If you’re still holding onto the idea that words reflect a real world in some direct way, you’re not alone. Most philosophers do. They believe that language is a tool to point at the world. That “the cat is on the mat” is either true or false, depending on what the world is doing. But that assumes the words themselves are stable—that “cat” and “mat” and “on” are fixed. They’re not. They drift.

Derrida asks us to bake with that drift. To abandon the fantasy of linguistic precision. To stop chasing the “real meaning” hiding behind the word like a drone signal waiting to reconnect. There is no original signal. Only echoes. Only traces. Every signifier points to another signifier in a chain that never ends. Open a dictionary and what do you find? A word pointing to another word, pointing to another word—no final anchor, no secret key, just an infinite relay.

And yet, we speak. We write. We name.

That’s the tension. Meaning is made—not found. And it’s never entirely in our control.

Realising this can feel disorienting. But it can also be liberating. Once you see that the words we thought were tethered to eternal meanings have always been in motion, you start to see possibilities. Language—like your new bread recipe—is made, not discovered.