Carefully Read the Case study and answer both questions in 250 words each.

Shades of meaning

If you have tried the activities in the previous parts, you are likely to be appreciating afresh just how much is going on around our words as we use them to communicate.

As poet T.S. Eliot says, Words... slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. Surely, our words have made it possible for us to construct our knowledge. But what meanings do they attempt to fix in place, and what meanings are they given by the millions of others who might read and interpret them? Our languages are, beyond doubt, an amazing way of knowing in enabling us to share knowledge. But how do we manage such sharing with words that decay with imprecision?

We do make various attempts to pin down and hold in place the core meanings of our words, prime among them being the move we take to define our terms. If we want to make sure that we are all talking about the same thing when we exchange ideas, we check our basic understanding. Many a discussion has reached a frustrating conclusion because the speakers never did figure out that they were entering with different understandings of a core concept, a central word. Witness social debates on poverty and development let alone the economy or freedom or war. When a simple word such as rock can slide around as we operate with it, what slippery territory we enter when we want to talk about the larger concepts that shape our understanding of the world!

When we define our terms, we are trying to use the symbols of our language to make another specific symbol precise. Definitions are statements within the system of symbols, rather like moves in a large language game, with each piece depending upon the others. We call the core definitional meaning the denotation of the word, or in cases of multiple core meanings (rock is a noun or a verb, with unlike meanings), the denotations.

We call the overtones of meaning, the nuances that arise as we use the word in particular contexts, its connotations. It is the connotations of a word that give it its flavour or its halo of meaning.

How we deal with the ambiguity of language its imprecision in meaning and its connotations depends on what the nature of our communication is and the kind of knowledge we are exchanging.

In some fields, precision is crucial. The sciences take care to define terms tightly in order to use exactly the right word, or leave language behind and instead opt in favour of using numbers or other sets of symbols. In other fields, finding exactly the right word may depend on deliberately using the ambiguity. Diplomacy and negotiation, for example, sometimes depend on indirection and subtle suggestion, and literature often depends for its expressive power on language whose connotations stir subjective associations of meaning. In yet other areas of our lives, we may not even care much about what the words we are using actually mean, since the communication of friendly chat is carried largely by the tone and accompanying body movement, and simply by the fact that we are making mouth noise companionably together. Altogether, the kind of knowledge we want to communicate affects our expectations of language and the ways we use it.

The Dictionary

1 What is the role of a dictionary? Is it descriptive, recording the changes in language as they happen? Or is it prescriptive, legislating what changes in language are acceptable?

2 In language, new words and usages are generated almost constantly, in response to changing need and creative impulse. Why do you think that some languages (French, Spanish, Icelandic) have official institutes which regulate what new ones are accepted? What are the arguments for and against preserving a language in a particular form?