How do we know what a word means? Do we ask a friend? Do we search our minds? Do we check the dictionary? If we ask the makers of dictionaries they will say that they have two principal methods. The first is to ask other dictionaries, and to etymologically - that is, through historical texts, determine the words. The second is to ask a great number of people the question "What do you mean when you say "so and so". These methods are respectively called "prescriptive" and "descriptive".
These methods roughly parallel our ideas around deduction and induction. Etymological determination is like deduction, precise and elegant, but it may have funny nonsensical results - words that do not mimic the real world use. Descriptive determination, like induction, may be correct just at the moment of printing, but the next time we ask things may have changed, so that meanings drift and change their shorts.
The problem of fixing words is a dual one. Either the words change their meaning to suit society, or people must change their ways to suit the words. And this is the problem we are facing. There is no stable ground from which to determine the meaning of a word. Words mean what we use them to mean at the moment we say it, though our hearers may not understand us. Failing to make ourselves understood in a conversation is not dramatic - we can reformulate what we mean into a different sentence, which will almost always do. But in a written format this possibility is lost. This blog post is about how we can ensure that we are understood, and how we can aid the understanding of our readers, despite the limitations of the written word.
The fickleness of words is hard to understand. We are natural language users, and live by words. So let me illustrate with a few examples how words writhe under our pen.
The first is to form portmanteaus in the connection between two existing words to form a third. You may now be thinking of obvious ones like bee-hive or meaning-full, but many words carry this structure. We have grammatical rules which put on suffixes - words we add on the back on a word to change it's meaning, or greek words like oxymoron which might not have made grammatical sense to the greeks, but which we can adopt because, since we don't understand greek grammar, we just add the meanings instead. Incidentally oxymoron means "sharp-round".
The second is new words. New words are often made like a blacksmith makes a sword out a of piece of iron, through constant strain and a hammering of meanings, to form something new. New words often start out as metaphors, or poetic turns, which are then used so much in their new capacity that we forget the original connection. "Smokes" used to be slang, "Goldylock-zone" came from a fairy tale character, and hundreds of years ago "text" meant "fabric".
Words are shaky ground, you cannot build great fortresses of understanding on words alone. As you build the foundations shapeshifts, crumbles and erodes. Your towers are made of bricks unknown to basement dwellers, so that any ambitious climber would be lost. You may seek to build pools of understanding, but your efforts drain through the cracks of translation.
You might now ask yourself, how great is this problem? It's not as if you couldn't understand what I was writing. And I must admit, in ordinary use a language performs fine. A measly blog-post such as this won't be outdated before it is obsolete. But this is a real problem.
For any research you must know the words of what you describe then and there, and the same words are supposed to be used for the same phenomenon a hundred years later. In politics words are tied into ideological battles, in which the same goings one are described in different colored words. In war the armies of soldiers and scores of journalists may describe similar events with radically different words. Right there, it is important to know how to make clear what a word means.
Words that shape-shift under your pen, which' historical determination is cracked, which' function is politically hijacked or which' meaning of popularly misunderstood, find it hard to settle powerfully in the minds of the readers.
So then the question becomes. How can we counteract the problem of shifting words, to create a clear base of understanding?
There are two principles to follow. The first is: "Say the same thing twice". If one word or sentence is poorly understood a synonym, definition or repetition in different words may help to determine the meaning of both words. For example, I may scramble to find the right words, and strive to do the same. The meanings of the words "scramble" and "strive", are not the same, but they are similar enough that, if we take the two together, we get a fairly good impression of what I mean. Or I could give a definition, for example of "ideology": "A system of logically connected ideas serving as a world view."
The words of a definitions are not synonyms to that defined, rather they are the parts that make it up. These words may have more general meanings of their own, but we faultlessly understand what they mean within the definition. Since they are many, they are also more historically robust.
Giving the same message twice gives you a firmer ground on which to build understanding in a text, because if one or both have two meanings or nuances to them, their joint inclusion will make them highlight each others correct meaning. "Scramble" may mean to right oneself in after a fall, and "strive" may mean "aspire" - but we have no difficulty understanding what I mean when both are included.
The second principle is to keep tight control over the associations formed around the words we are using. Make sure that your metaphors extend naturally. For instance, earlier I used a building metaphor when describing the phenomena of "understand and text". If my reader were to think more of text and meaning within this metaphor he or she will find that it will provide many handy ideas. Rooms (of meaning) may be "illuminated", important words may act as "supporting structure", or high towers may provide a "great view of things".
Scholars may use words which indicate which tradition they belong to, politicians which ideology they subscribe to, clergy which god they pray to or corporations which market they sell to. Words are often grouped into "families", which they appear more often together with. By exclusively using words from a particular family you are signalling a standpoint, which will remain more robust than single words.
Familiarity is a very fundamental principle of understanding, which you will discover repeated on all levels of text. Words have the same flavor within sentences (often loaned from bigger more stable metaphors) such as "She was a sweet girl, but her sister was bitter", and whole chapters may allude to other chapters in other books. I once read a chapter written as a dialogue, inspired by a dialogue written by Louis Carroll, inspired by a dialogue written by Plato - the similarity of the texts bound them together in history and tradition.
Because the phenomena of familiarity is so basic, it is very hard to understand. It is true that there is familiarity in the sense that they "belong together naturally as a class", but it is also true that there is no such thing as a "natural class". Words are made by people, and so are classes of words. Words of the same "family" are known as such only because they are "familiar" to us as such.
Did you get that? Let's try again. We know groups of words belong together because we learned it. That's all. But how does this affect what I'm trying to convey with the second principle? Well, it all boils down to this:
Because not everyone is equally familiar in every field, you must choose who you are writing for before you start writing. That way you can tailor your connotations and metaphors to just that group of people. You must relinquish the notion that you can write just as well to everyone. Give in to the idea that specialized literature is just that.
Without a sense of who you are writing for, you get into the same problems that populist newspapers are having. They are writing for the "lowest common denominator", which translated means "so simply that everyone can understand" - and that is very simply indeed. A problem best described by the aphorism "There is no use in learning to swim in a pool so shallow you could stand in it". Instead we should seek to counteract the uncertainties of our text, to build a tower of understanding.
Thank you for reading this short essay - if you wish to explore some of these more deeply then I recommend googling "connotation", "denotation", "Sense/reference", "Metaphor, allegory", "lemma", or just ask me, and I'll point you onwards.
