You use language effortlessly every day, and rarely stop to think it over. Because why would you think over, that which you use to think over? - Okay, that was an instance of what I call gratuitous complexity - just being difficult for he sake of it.
Many of the more difficult sentences are the ones we call aphorisms. German philosophers have been experts at this. Take Nietzsche for example: "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how". A sentence which reveals a remarkable command of language.
But it isn't the language per se which he is in command of, well, that too - but more importantly it is the knowledge of what language is, and what it does. He peered deep into the words, and sucked out the marrow of the word "why" and "how". He has found their true meaning, and through this he has found a new place for them, in a new sentence, giving us a new sense of new meaning.
It is not easy to look into words this way. Imagine that word is a seed. The coat of the seed, is what it look like. The kernel of the seed is the meaning. To get to the meaning, you have to remove the coat.
I'll show you how. Think of a word like "man". When you read the word "man", you think of a man - not the word "man". So that if I say the words, "chap", "male", "dude" or "fellow", what do you really think of then? Then answer is, most likely, you think of a man. The man in your mind is the kernel of truth behind the veil of the words. When you need to know the true meaning, separated from the empty shell of words - if you need to, to do some serious thinking - then you can find all the synonyms and see what your imagination reveals to you that lies behind.
There is another technique - one that you might find easier. And that is by way of a simple definition. The words "definition" comes from the fifteenth century - and it meant to mark off the boundaries. When you define something, you give a synonym of many words - and you draw a ring around them and say "This is the complete meaning".
There is an advantage to definition. Then you can see into the kernel and figure out what it's made of. Take this definition of man from Webster's dictionary. "An adult male of the human kind: distinguished from woman, boy and youth." From this we get the information, that a man is an adult, and a human.
To know what something is, is also to know what it is not. The Webster's entry makes this perfectly clear - "A man is distinguished from boy". And were you to try your hand at finding out what peace really is - than I think you'd find that most other people have thought of it as the absence of war.
It is one thing to see behind the word "man", and quite another to find the meaning of "peace". Peace is so abstract, so removed from our everyday experience. Many of these things far removed are harder to peer through, because they themselves rest only on words. But in any case, in most thing we can dig fairly quickly down to our experience itself.
Shakespeare put into the mouth of Juliet: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Which shows that, the experience helps us know, in the ende, what truly is - and what isn't.
There is a wealth of knowledge and perspectives here which I have not covered, but I think this is enough for a start. - The full breadth of this whole field of inquiry has filled thousands of books through millennia, and does not compact to the form of a blogpost. If you wish to enquire more - then I recommend reading about Aristotle's Categories, and then moving on to the original work.
