You know you're a semiotician when...

• you make models of models for a living
• you know the difference between a horse and a white horse
• you establish your disciplinary history by labeling certain scholars and theories, who make no reference to semiotics, as ‘crypto-semioticians’
• you're not only part of a discipline, you're part of a metadiscipline
• people think you study traffic signs or religious symbols
• you dread family reunions because you’ll have to explain what it is you study
• you dread family reunions because after failing to explain what it is you study, you’ll have to explain what you'll do with it (which is EVERYTHING, you do EVERYTHING with it)
• you literally study the meaning of life
• abduction doesn’t mean kidnapping
• you begin most of your papers by justifying why your approach is necessary, and what it adds to the discussion already being had by other more developed and recognized disciplines for likely a much longer time
• ad hoc methodology is your modus operandi
• you hate Richard Dawkins
• natural scientists generally hate you, if they even know about you. which they don’t
• your hypothetical club-house would read: “no logical positivists allowed!”
• you could recite peirce’s definition of a sign in your sleep
• one of your biggest pet peeves is when scholarly entrepreneurs borrow semiotic terminology and then mess it all up
• you can count the number of places in the world you could possibly study your discipline proper on one hand
• when someone tells you to ‘replace’ your cigarette smoking habit with another healthier habit as a means of quitting, you criticize the approach for being quantitative and have another cigarette
• the meteorologist on tv is anthropomorphizing weather patterns
• you feel exhausted after reading 20 pages from your field
• ‘isomorphism’ is one of your favorite words
• you think one of the most important things we must do in life is distinguish the meta-language from the object-language
• sometimes the sheer arbitrariness of it all is just....SO COOL