Words. Their Nature, Uses and Abuses

[Sunstone]

"If you wish to converse with me, define your terms." -- Voltaire
​

It all began -- all of it -- the day I got pissed off at my high school English teacher. Each day, she began class with a five minute exercise. We were required to write a single, but proper paragraph of at least three sentences within no more than five minutes.

I was seventeen and, although I was widely acknowledged to be the most handsome lad in the entire American Midwest at the time, I was still totally incompetent when it came to writing grammatically correct sentences, I had no concept of what a real paragraph was, and I could scarcely think fast enough to come up with a subject to write about in just five minutes.

Three sentences? Five minutes? One paragraph? Impossible!

For weeks, I handed in one disaster of English prose after another, my frustration increasing and increasing, until one day I turned red as a beet, slammed my pen down on the still blank sheet of paper, sat back, and crossed my arms. When the time came came to hand in the assignment, I had nothing to hand in.

Thankfully, my teacher did not press me. She simply whispered, "Sorry you're having a rough day", as she passed by collecting the other student's work, and then she seemed to forgot all about me. But I turned inward and silently seethed through the rest of the session.

To be continued....

 

[Sunstone]

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” ― Rudyard Kipling​

The next period was library. Ordinarily, I used my hour in the school's library to read, but that day I was too angry to read. How incredibly unreasonable of my English teacher to require the impossible of me, the impossible of any seventeen year-old! Indeed, the impossible of any human. I was furious with her! Didn't she know that five minutes is short by at least a whole day of the minimum time required to get an idea out and down on paper? Had I not proved that very point myself by day after day being incapable of doing it? Proved it!

Then it came to me! The thought that changed everything. I would stick it to her in her own language. I would prove to her she was a fool. I would write an essay -- a whole essay -- my first ever essay. And my essay would be on the topic of precisely why and how it was indeed impossible to write a three sentence paragraph in a mere five minutes. Brilliant!

Only I didn't quite know how to start. So I sat around. And I sat around. Until I became lost in thought.

Presently, I felt better. I had begun mentally composing my essay.

In the end, the essay would run to just two handwritten pages and take me several hours stretched over three days to write. It's thesis would morph with its writing until it thesis ended up being something along the lines of, "The very nature of language itself makes translating ideas from thoughts into language an impossible task to accomplish in a short period of time. No amount of practice will ever change that fact because the problem lies not with the skills of the writer, but with the messed up nature of words -- as all truly competent English teachers who are not themselves morons know to be true."

Thus began my nearly life-long fascination with the nature of words.

To be continued....

 

[Sunstone]

“We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. ​

Because I became interested in the nature of words, I went on to become acutely conscious of a few facts about their nature. Of course, one of those facts was that words have no 'true' meanings, but that their meanings are purely arbitrary.

Ferdinand de Saussure was not the first person in the history of Western thought to express the notion that the meanings of words were purely arbitrary, but he was for a while perhaps the most famous person for expressing that notion.

He lived from 1857 to 1913 and he was one of the two men known as "the fathers of semiotics". (The other man was Charles Sanders Pierce, who has also been called "the greatest logician in American history", and "the father of pragmatism".) Semiotics is the study of signs. A sign is anything (such as a word) that communicates a meaning, that is not the sign itself, to the interpreter of the sign. e.g. semiotics is the discipline that investigates whether the meanings of words are fixed or arbitrary.

They are arbitrary. As Ferdinand observed over a hundred years ago (and as others had observed before him), words do not have fixed, proper, or natural meanings. Their meanings are wholly a matter of what people agree to as their meanings. And their meanings almost inevitably change over time as people shift and change what they mean by them. For example, in Middle English, the world "deer" could mean any animal, and the word "girl" meant a young person of either sex. Of course, those meanings are no longer in use. But it is not that those words have become corrupted from an earlier 'true' meaning into today's meanings. There is no such thing as 'the true meaning of a word', except perhaps in the sense of 'the most common meaning' of a word.

Perhaps depending on how much thought you've given it, the fact the meaning of words is purely arbitrary might or might not be news to you. I suspect for most of us, it is about as much news as "the sky is blue". But every now and then, I come across someone who seems to have never heard (or at least to have never fully understood) the fact.

To be continued...

 

[Sunstone]

“Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?” ― J.R.R. Tolkien​

That was the case a couple years back when my telling someone that the meanings of words was arbitrary almost immediately led to his stalking me from one thread to another, posting thinly veiled insults about my alleged habits and beliefs when it came to how I used words. At first, I tried to explain to him how he was misinterpreting what my views. But he would not listen to me. Consequently, he stalked me for several days until I finally became annoyed with his misstatements about my habits and beliefs. Perhaps by coincidence, he soon thereafter departed the Forum and has not returned. The episode illustrated to me that there are still people in this world who firmly believe it is almost criminal to under any and all circumstances depart from the 'dictionary definitions' of words.

My first wife was an associate editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Down the hall from her office was the office of someone who worked for a dictionary owned by the same company that owned the Britannica. She and he became friends and eventually explained to her in quite some detail exactly how a dictionary is put together.

Without going into anywhere near the detail she later passed onto me, the process might be summarized as this: The dictionary workers spend their days reading publication after publication while making very careful notes about how words are being used by people. Publications include recently released books, newly issued magazines, the day's newspapers (and I suppose these days, the most popular internet websites and platforms). They amass volumes of notes about how words are being publicly used around the whole nation -- and sometimes beyond. If enough people start using a word in a new way, they update their dictionary with a new definition for that word.

That's the gist of it. As you can see, the dictionary meanings of words are not handed down from on high by experts in the English language. They are instead compiled from studying how folks are actually using the words. The next time you cite a dictionary definition of a word to someone, you are not telling them the 'true', 'real', 'official', or 'authorized' meaning of the word. Nothing like that. You are not even telling them the only meaning or meanings of the word they have a right to use. Gods no! You are simply telling them those meanings of the word that a bunch of hardworking dictionary people came across in the publications they read. If 100,000 people are somewhere using a word -- but they are not using it in the relatively few and far between publications that are being monitored by the dictionary people -- you will never see those people's usage show up in a dictionary.

To be continued...

 

[Sunstone]

“The abuse of symbolism is like the abuse of food or drink: it makes people ill, and so their reactions become deranged.” ― Alfred Korzybski
​

Even though 'everyone knows' the meanings of words are arbitrarily assigned to words, plenty of people are in the habit of shoving dictionaries under other people's noses and pointing out the definitions as if those definitions were the sole and only definitions anyone had a legal, natural, or moral right to use. Even though 'everyone knows' the meanings of words are arbitrary, legions of people act as if they knew nothing of the sort.

It is quite curious that we humans can at times feel real emotional pain when someone uses a word (or idea) in a way that we ourselves do not approve of.

Those of you who enjoy evolutionary puzzles might wish to investigate that phenomenon with an eye to perhaps figuring out how it could have evolved in us. (It turns out that a similar phenomenon -- that of becoming nauseated by falsehoods, lies, willful ignorance, misrepresentations, etc -- most likely has to do with the fact an area of the brain responsible for deciding if something is false lies very close to an area of the brain responsible for deciding if food is going spoiled or is rotting.) ​

But whatever the origin of the fact we are capable of feeling a tinge of emotional pain when people "misuse" words, it seems likely the fact reinforces the almost instinctual feelings of so many people that words should or ought to have firm and fixed meanings, even if they do not.

To be continued....

 

[Sunstone]

“He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.” ― Michael Pollan
​

In my senior year at university, I signed up for a high-level seminar on Nietzsche's thought and sex life. The professor would not be lecturing us. Instead, we were each to pick a date during the semester on which to spend twenty or thirty minutes delivering a paper on some aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy. Afterwards, another twenty to thirty minutes would be used to answer questions from the professor and other students.

Richard gave his paper towards the end of the semester. When he announced his topic that night, I almost visibly cringed.

I knew Richard well, and I liked him. But I also had a strong suspicion how he was going to treat his topic, "Nietzsche's Idea that God is Dead". He and I had taken several courses together in philosophy and comparative religion over the past three years, and I knew he was zealous in his opposition to atheism. Hence, I expected him to somehow turn his topic into a boring crusade against it that would leave almost no one in the room fully awake by the time he finished.

Actually, it turned out worse that that. Far worse.

Essentially, Richard that night made nearly every major academic mistake you could make back in those days. By the time he was done with it, people were not yawning. Instead, most were staring off in odd directions around the room, pretending to be fascinated by the lights and walls. The silence! Even the professor seemed at a loss what to say. In the end, he dismissed us when not one person had any questions or comments on Richard's paper. Poor Richard himself blushed with embarrassment.

What had Richard done? What had he not done! However, I don't have room to go into everything, so I will just stick to one or two things he had done wrong.

To begin, he had failed to grasp what Nietzsche meant by "God is dead". That was bad, but failing to understand someone is quite common. By itself, it's an excusable mistake. You just ask questions, and then try and try again until you get it.

However, Richard had taken Nietzsche's statement literally. Which implied the thought had not occurred to him that Nietzsche possibly meant something besides the literal meaning of the words, "God is dead". That sort of mistake, in a senior year philosophy student, went against gravity. Half of the drill in philosophy courses is to pour over ideas and arguments asking over and over again, "what does the author mean by these words". It's almost pounded into you that you don't do anything else before you make sure you understand the terms and ideas you're studying. How could Richard possibly forget full half of what it means to study someone's writings?

The worst part of that was that the statement, "God is dead", makes almost no sense when taken literally. The Christian concept of god is such that God cannot die. So, had Nietzsche really meant his statement to be taken literally, it would more or less logically follow he was trying to refute the existence of the Christian god. But if that was indeed the case, then saying he does not exist because he died is arguing on the level of a toddler. Hadn't Richard noticed that? Shouldn't that have been his first clue he was off to a bad start?

But in the end, it was not his sloppy reasoning that had made everyone embarrassed for him. it was that his reasoning raised -- but left unanswered -- the question of whether Richard was being intellectually dishonest? That is, were his mistakes truly accidental? He was, after all, a reasonably smart guy, and most of those in the room were in positions to know that about him. So how then could such 'stupid' mistakes be wholly innocent?

Witnessing Richard butcher Nietzsche that night was the single most awkward moment of my university career. If it had not been Richard -- if it had been some stranger off the street -- I would have brushed it off. But I knew Richard. Over the years, he and I had seen and listened to each other in so many class sessions that we had almost become friends on that basis alone.

It took me a long time before I learned enough about human nature to realize that the most likely explanation for Richard's behavior was not that he had suddenly turned stupid, nor that he had suddenly decided to become intellectually dishonest, but that he had been so determined to score points against Nietzsche -- and by extension, atheism -- that he had blindly latched onto the first, simplest, easiest idea he could come up with about what was wrong about the statement, "God is dead" and then pushed that idea as far and as fast as he could.

Thoughts? Comments?

 

[Sunstone]

 

[Curious George]

Thoughts? Comments?

Well you had this thread locked down for quite some time.

Thought: in our desperate attempts to connect and communicate we want (possibly need) words to mean what we think they mean.

A humorous aside: Even after all of these years your essay is still not grammatically correct.

Whether we are talking about your teacher, your ex, Richard or you the drive to connect is present and powerful. Sometimes in our eagerness to do so, we findourselves doing exactly the opposite. A finer tragedy will never be written than when the gods bestowed language on man.

 

[sealchan]

“He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.” ― Michael Pollan
​

In my senior year at university, I signed up for a high-level seminar on Nietzsche's thought and sex life. The professor would not be lecturing us. Instead, we were each to pick a date during the semester on which to spend twenty or thirty minutes delivering a paper on some aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy. Afterwards, another twenty to thirty minutes would be used to answer questions from the professor and other students.

Richard gave his paper towards the end of the semester. When he announced his topic that night, I almost visibly cringed.

I knew Richard well, and I liked him. But I also had a strong suspicion how he was going to treat his topic, "Nietzsche's Idea that God is Dead". He and I had taken several courses together in philosophy and comparative religion over the past three years, and I knew he was zealous in his opposition to atheism. Hence, I expected him to somehow turn his topic into a boring crusade against it that would leave almost no one in the room fully awake by the time he finished.

Actually, it turned out worse that that. Far worse.

Essentially, Richard that night made nearly every major academic mistake you could make back in those days. By the time he was done with it, people were not yawning. Instead, most were staring off in odd directions around the room, pretending to be fascinated by the lights and walls. The silence! Even the professor seemed at a loss what to say. In the end, he dismissed us when not one person had any questions or comments on Richard's paper. Poor Richard himself blushed with embarrassment.

What had Richard done? What had he not done! However, I don't have room to go into everything, so I will just stick to one or two things he had done wrong.

To begin, he had failed to grasp what Nietzsche meant by "God is dead". That was bad, but failing to understand someone is quite common. By itself, it's an excusable mistake. You just ask questions, and then try and try again until you get it.

However, Richard had taken Nietzsche's statement literally. Which implied the thought had not occurred to him that Nietzsche possibly meant something besides the literal meaning of the words, "God is dead". That sort of mistake, in a senior year philosophy student, went against gravity. Half of the drill in philosophy courses is to pour over ideas and arguments asking over and over again, "what does the author mean by these words". It's almost pounded into you that you don't do anything else before you make sure you understand the terms and ideas you're studying. How could Richard possibly forget full half of what it means to study someone's writings?

The worst part of that was that the statement, "God is dead", makes almost no sense when taken literally. The Christian concept of god is such that God cannot die. So, had Nietzsche really meant his statement to be taken literally, it would more or less logically follow he was trying to refute the existence of the Christian god. But if that was indeed the case, then saying he does not exist because he died is arguing on the level of a toddler. Hadn't Richard noticed that? Shouldn't that have been his first clue he was off to a bad start?

But in the end, it was not his sloppy reasoning that had made everyone embarrassed for him. it was that his reasoning raised -- but left unanswered -- the question of whether Richard was being intellectually dishonest? That is, were his mistakes truly accidental? He was, after all, a reasonably smart guy, and most of those in the room were in positions to know that about him. So how then could such 'stupid' mistakes be wholly innocent?

Witnessing Richard butcher Nietzsche that night was the single most awkward moment of my university career. If it had not been Richard -- if it had been some stranger off the street -- I would have brushed it off. But I knew Richard. Over the years, he and I had seen and listened to each other in so many class sessions that we had almost become friends on that basis alone.

It took me a long time before I learned enough about human nature to realize that the most likely explanation for Richard's behavior was not that he had suddenly turned stupid, nor that he had suddenly decided to become intellectually dishonest, but that he had been so determined to score points against Nietzsche -- and by extension, atheism -- that he had blindly latched onto the first, simplest, easiest idea he could come up with about what was wrong about the statement, "God is dead" and then pushed that idea as far and as fast as he could.

Thoughts? Comments?

Words are pointers.

In IT land, specifically in computer programming, there are variables called pointers which is an area of memory which stores the address of an area of memory for some other data.

By analogy our human brains have sensory neurons which translate physical sensory input into neural action potentials. These action potentials are indistinguishsble from each other whether they are from a neuron responding to a photon, or a neuron responding to the motion of a hair, etc. These action potentials arrive at cortical areas which are laid out like maps. These cortical maps have interconnections that allow areas of one map to influence areas on another map. Somewhere in all of this is a map that connects directly to our human language in skills.

By producing vocalizations, we each individuals express the neural action potentials that all this neural processing inspires in us to express. Each map holds on to some semblance of order but that order is in a constant shifting dance with the many other map-dance partners in the brain.

A word is a node in a complex, adaptive system connected internally in neural networks and externally to a community of reality interpreting other brains. Why on earth would anyone think that a comprehensive, internally consistent rational system of truth on top of such a fluid operating system?

What you can expect is a system of truth more or less ready for the moment and for a given purpose in that moment, and one that often shifts but not so radically that you cant get "survival" done.

Oh and did I mention that there are at least two basic systems in the brain supportive of rationality? With such semi-ordered truth making software it is good to have at least two systems tuned to different terms of rationalization on hand in case one proves insufficient.