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−Table of Contents
Major trains of thought
Philosophy
Trainwrecks
Nature of Things
Fact of the Universe
Tolerance
Ship of Theseus
I'm 14 and this is deep
Words
Claim
Court
Redemption
Words are so inaccurate indeed, they even change meaning depending on context. From the perspective of the guy who wrote this, it was absolutely clear what the headline meant.
“
Okay look, 'whirl around' and 'spin' don't mean what you think down here; because, in the land of quantum, words mean nothing, there is only math.
“
~CGP Grey, in The Simple Secret of Runway Digits
Words are individual, meaningful elements1) as part of a wider framework called a language, used to communicate meaning from one place to another.2) Words define themselves through 1) their use and 2) the patterns that they are associated with.
I approach the world as a problem to solve. Hunger, suffering, war or even simple things like meeting a friend or sharing your innermost thoughts are all problems to be attacked and overcome. For functioning collaboration between humans, language is an essential part of day to day life. Words are the building blocks of such languages and their use is governed by grammar. Now, the problem of words is that words are but a thought in our brains. We are already limited to our highly restricted perception of reality through the use of our senses (which are subject to all kinds of biases), and then trying to establish uniquely identifying labels to attach to things that aren't even fundamental truths of the universe (but merely our personal interpretation of things) will cause a lot of headache in conversations where precision is needed.
Many people, past me included, confuse the authority of words and think that is has real, substantive descriptive power on the real world. A Woman is whatever we associate with the concept of a woman in our brains, but the word does not describe a fact of the universe. The reality is that “woman” will be a set of neurons in our brains that are closely connected to other neurons in our brain that store significant memories and experiences involving whatever we thought would fit into the same category. This category in our brain exists not because it exists in the physical plain, but because it serves as a useful discriminator in our brain. What exists in the physical plane are anatomical differences, but any way to categorize them authoritatively is an attempt to make prescriptions on a concept that doesn't accept prescriptions: Reality.
This example shines light on a major flaw in our conceptualization of words, which is that they are not finite. Words are not an exact discriminator for physical realities. Dictionaries do not serve to distribute the exact, physical or atomical meaning of a reality, they merely try to compress what most people commonly associate with a word into a short description, all of which is subject to changes in how a word is used and then also filtered through our limited physical ability to perceive the real world3).
So, if words are inaccurate and they don't mean what they mean4) and they are fundamentally flawed through our limited perception and everyone understands words differently, then what's the deal? Well, we still need them. Despite everything, we still need to be able to communicate meaning somehow and, until we find a way to transmit meaning between brains directly, we have to work with what we got: Encoding meaning into words that don't mean anything, using a language that is only a theoretical, transported via soundwaves or some other means that is susceptible to distortion, to then be decoded by another brain in the hope that what arrived at their brain is at least similar to what was originally meant to be said.