These terms were coined by Saussure himself. "Langue" is a language system, a set of options or possibilities, whereas "parole" is a particular utterance or statement. Saussure, as a linguist, cares more for "langue" than "parole": he wants to discover and then to determine the set of rules or conventions that govern the production of particular utterances.

2. "diachronic" and "synchronic" (812):

A diachronic relationship is temporal; it's the relationship a word or phrase or event might have with words or phrases or events that come before or after it. By contrast, a synchronic relationship has nothing to do with time or sequence; it's the relationship that a word or phrase or event might have with all other words, phrases, or events in a language or a narrative.

Diachronic relationships are often described as horizontal, and synchronic relationships as vertical. To see why, you might think of the horizontal and vertical columns in Levi-Strauss's chart for the Oedipus myth. If you read horizontally, you are focusing on diachronic relationships--that is, on temporal relationships: first Cadmos seeks his sister, then he kills the dragon, then the Spartoi kill one another, and so on. Now, if you read vertically, you are beginning to move towards the synchronic. See why? You're no longer concerned simply with events that directly precede or succeed each other, but rather with events that may be distant from each other in time.

3. "chthonian" and "autochthonian" (814):

These terms are crucial to Levi-Strauss's analysis of the Oedipus myth. Something is "chthonian" if it lives in the ground; it's "autochthonian" if it springs up out of the ground or is somehow born from the ground.