www.alphadictionary.com

Or even in our attempts to communicate with each other on an everyday basis...

Experiment: when leading a class or group, ask them to take a picturee of the first thing that comes to mind when you say a common word. Then say "cat." Ask the class what color cat they saw. I guarantee you there will be a variety of colors, and if the class is large enough, one or two will have seen a lion or tiger. Now if a simple word like cat can elicit such a variety of images, what happens when we say "government" or "health care," etc. As you imply, a major miracle that we even seem to communicate.

Some character in Alice in Wonderland asserted that any word he used meant exactly what he chose it to mean. If one of my grandkids hadn't copped my copy of Alice, I could tell you who said it.

My Alice in Wonderland is downstairs in the library - I'll have to check tomorrow. But the arrogance sounds just like the Red Queen. But then, it could also have been either the Mad Hatter, or even the Cheshire Cat. Lewis Carroll's reality is so convoluted sometimes, many of the characters are likely candidates for the pronouncement. I really will have to look it up tomorrow. Unless someone else beats me to it.

I believe it was the Cheshire in a discussion over "glory" which obviously means a nice knock-down argument. The question is who is to be master, that's all, you or the words. A word means exactly what I say it means.

I have a late professor friend that maintained that words did not have meanings, they had uses. Didn't agree, but it's worth pondering.

I believe it was the Cheshire in a discussion over "glory" which obviously means a nice knock-down argument. The question is who is to be master, that's all, you or the words. A word means exactly what I say it means.

It was actually Humpty Dumpty:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dum ... king-Glass

I have a late professor friend that maintained that words did not have meanings, they had uses. Didn't agree, but it's worth pondering.

This is a controversial issue in the philosophy of language. One of the leading figures in that field was the American philosopher W. V. O. Quine, who claimed that we can never be absolutely certain what someone means by any particular word.