Humpty Dumpty and the power of words

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll, chapter 6, page 205 in the 1934 edition

The answer to Alice’s question is “of course”. A chain of letters or symbols can stand for any meaning we choose. We can all choose any meaning we wish. If we choose something so novel that it amounts to a new language spoken only by ourselves and we cannot understand or refuse to understand other meanings, we will find ourselves unable to communicate and quite possibly at risk of being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. But the answer “of course” would not have helped poor Alice.

If Alice has said “The question is … whether we can communicate if you make words mean so many different things”, the answer would have been “of course not”. At the heart of communication is the belief that roughly the same meanings are being attached by whoever is using those words to communicate.

We see when this breaks down. I’m old enough that ‘woke’ just means ‘I was asleep and now I am not’. My teenager daughter has been trying to explain the meaning she attaches to the word. We fumbled around with her using her language and me using mine to find a point where we were both using words sufficiently similarly for her to communicate the meaning she attaches to ‘woke’. It took a lot of ‘Do you mean…?’ ‘Is it like…?’ ‘Well what would you say if you wanted to say…?’ and resorting to examples of TV scenes where ‘woke’ was being enacted.

Sometimes we don’t recognise that our belief that we are using words with roughly similar meanings is unfounded. Then we miscommunicate. We talk at cross-purposes, getting more and more frustrated because the other person or people seem to be being deliberately awkward. As an aside, I’ve found a great activity when this occurs in meetings is to go round the table asking what people are picturing when they use a word – that soon makes visible the different meanings being attached to that word.

Sometimes people create sub-cultures or establish language boundaries to sub-cultures by sharing a meaning for a word that is distinct from the meanings other people ascribe to the word. Crip has one set of meanings in the social world I spend most of my time inhabiting – it is negative, abusive, uncomfortable. It has a different set of meanings in one of the social worlds I visit – check out crip theory and crip culture.

The degree to which the meanings of the words overlap is about our culture. The more our cultures overlap, the more our meanings overlap. Where there feels a wide gulf between cultures, we are cautious about assuming that the meanings of our words are sufficiently similar for easy communication. Where we assume our cultures are similar, we are more likely to be caught out and miscommunicate.

And once we are talking culture, we get to Humpty Dumpty’s question. In a world where there are many overlapping but shared meanings within a given time and culture, and a world where meanings and usage of words change over time and across contexts and cultures, the significant question is not what does a word mean but “Which meaning is to be master – that’s all”.

The painful irony is that we can only discuss this using words, whose meanings are fluid and where we have no way to know for sure how your meaning relates to anyone else’s meanings, or to what extent that which is inside your head can ever be adequately configured and conveyed in words.  But in this word-focused world, try we must!