“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!
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