Thinking about Words, and Words to Think By

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Discussion of important social issues in the popular press, among friends, in political skirmishing, even sometimes in academic journals, is often confused by inattention to the meaning of key words in the discussion. This site is offered in the hope it might help encourage readers to pay more attention to how they and those with whom they interact use words in social discourse.

The visitor is asked to think carefully about a number of words commonly used in social and political discussion. Unfortunately, these words are often appear unclear to both user and audience. When we read discussions of political and social matters in the media or hear them in the mouths of our leaders, we expect that many terms will be used loosely and without careful consideration, yet too often those who would communicate with us use emotive/rational/social/judgmental terms such as evil, good, belief, moral, immoral, — or democracy, freedom, — or war, and terrorism in egregiously deceptive ways without even realizing it.

We are concerned in these pages primarily with words and not concepts. But our eventual goal is to help readers consider, develop, and express the concepts that lie behind the words that they and others use. People do not think with words, except on the most superficial and verbose level. Words and the grammars that organize them are tools for communicating the thoughts that lie behind the words. Communication is always imperfect even within one language, and more so across language boundaries. All of us, for example, have a concept of "red", but when we use the word red, we should realize that those with whom we interact will have slightly different concepts of the boundaries of red, of where the spectrum differentiates red from purple, pink, or orange. Many people say that they believe in "God", that is they have a concept of a supreme being. But when they use "God" to express this concept, they are generally quite aware that their word will be understood by others in many and even contradictory ways.

Another way to understand this problem is to remember how many people you "know" in your daily commerce. If you are like me, you may have concepts (including visualizations) of many more persons than you are able to attach names to when for social purposes you need to (for example, in an introduction). Some persons may exist clearly in your mind throughout your life without ever having a name attached to them. Many people know few names of the trees or birds or insects around them, yet can describe and deal with the concepts of these when they need to.

Often the words we use to express ourselves are omnibus words that have a variety of meanings. In other words, we have several concepts in our mind that can be communicated by only one word (although we can always develop a context of many words that will make our concept clearer to the audience —— which may be ourselves). If we look, for example, at "right" (defined here under "Political Terms") we will note that the dictionary has given over thirty meanings, from right as in "turn right", to right as in "correct", to right as in the "political right". Spoken language tends to relate more closely to the conceptual background than written language, but many homophones, such as "horse" and "hoarse" illustrate its impreciseness. We could not possibly think if we were limited to words as the basic units of thought.

In context, the intended meaning of a word is usually selected by our audience, but it may not be, and even if it is, there is often an infection of the intended meaning by the other, non-intended meanings that both speaker and audience cannot totally exclude from their unconscious. This problem was addressed years ago by Count Korzybski in his General Semantics. His solution was to use subscripts after omnibus words to make meanings clearer (clumsy in print, even more so in spoken language). An example I have used is the word "ecologist". When I studied ecology briefly in the late 1940s, ecology was defined unambiguously as the scientific study of the relationships of organisms within defined environments. Ecologists were not advocates, but students, as interested in change as stasis. Ecology can still mean this today. But in current usage an ecologist is generally understood to be someone who is an advocate for preserving the environment, for maintaining conservatively the environmental relationships that exist in untrammeled nature. Following Korzybski, we would label the first usage ecology₁ and the second ecology₂. (For more on this subject, see Alternative Environmental₂ Policy Concepts).

In offering these pages we are not pretending to the expertise of linguists or lexicographers, nor even of columnists such as William Safire in the New York Times Magazine. Most of the discussions they generate stem from a deep interest in words for their own sake, often delving into word or expression origins in the deep past or in the immediate present. Our interest is rather in the content of the thinking that is expressed by the terms with whose definitions we are concerned.