On the Meaning of Word Choice

A word is “a speech sound or series of speech sounds that symbolises and communicates a meaning usually without being divisible into smaller units capable of independent use.” (Merriam-Webster online dictionary.) As such words are the fundamental units of language. Any transfer of meaning or communication that uses language occurs in units of words.

Therefore word choice is of critical importance in communicating meaning. Choose the wrong word and the wrong meaning is conveyed. For example, substituting the wrong word in the sentence: “Three tourists entered the plane” gets you “Three terrorists entered the plane,” which has a completely different meaning.

The skill of proper word choice is vital to precise and meaningful communication! However, precise and meaningful communication is made difficult or even impossible because of the following factors:

1. Words may (and often do) have many different meanings. For instance “Word” can mean an order or command, news, information, a promise, a saying or proverb, a quarrelsome utterance of communication, and many other possible meanings (Merriam-Webster online dictionary.)

2. Meanings of words change over time. Trivia once meant the meeting place of three roads, in Latin, but it came to mean news or gossip, and now means unimportant matters or a quizzing game involving obscure facts. (Merriam-Webster)

3. People may have different ideas about what words mean. I may think a Lady is a woman belonging to the nobility, you may think it means a woman with good manners.

These three factors taken together make communication impossible, or at least very very difficult, even before you consider factors such as the speaker or listener's own prejudices and habits of thought, culture, life experience, language or knowledge of current events or discourse and education.

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida argues that language is a structured system of signs and that the meanings of individual signs are produced by the différance between that sign and other signs. This means that words are not self sufficiently meaningful but only meaningful as part of a larger structure that makes meaning possible. Derrida therefore argues that the meaning of language is dependent on the larger structures of language and cannot originate in the unity of conscious experience. Derrida therefore argues that linguistic meaning does not originate in the intentional meaning of the speaking subject. (Wikipedia)

In other words, according to Derrida no meaning is created by me in this writing no matter what words I choose! This means that this essay is meaningless. Any meaning you think you find in it is in fact just the product of your own isolated thoughts and imagination, in the context of your larger cultural structures and understanding, and the meaning if any that you interpret here is most certainly not any hypothetical meaning that I might have intended to convey.

As the Bard says: If this be true "and it be on me proved, I never wrote, nor no man ever loved." (William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116).

It may be more productive to consider word choice in terms of information theory, which is is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information (Wikipedia). Information theory essentially considers communication in terms of the transfer of numbers between a sender and a receiver. Any expressed meaning – graphical, physical, audio, visual or written may be expressed as a series of numbers, and Information theory provides very useful results about how these numbers may be best transferred between a sender and a receiver; which leads to very useful results in the field of data compression.

However, Information theory has nothing to say about meaning. It is like a cynic, who, according to Oscar Wilde, knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Shakespeare's sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments.”) is only 109 words long, yet it's meanings have fascinated scholars for centuries, and generated tomes of learned analysis. With lossless compression this poem could be encoded and compressed down to a mere handful of bytes without losing any of it's meaning, but what is that meaning? Neither information theory or post modern philosophy have any answers! Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet) Don't ask us – we just work here!

Oh what fools these mortals be! (Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream.)

So, then, is any meaning being communicated here, and if so, how can we demonstrate the fact? Obviously I think meaning is conveyed, or why would I bother to write in the first place? When I am communicating with someone and I wonder if my meaning is getting across I ask them to say the meaning back in their own words.

Please rewrite the meaning of this essay in your own words and send it back via the comments.

When air traffic controllers give instructions to a pilot they ask him to “read them back” to be sure that he has received them correctly, and that, presumably, he understands them. There's no time in this situation for a debate on post-modern meaning construction or information theory. The meaning and understanding conveyed is of vital importance to air safety – a miscommunication here could result in a crash.

And the system works. The safety of modern air transport is a testament to the fact that information and meaning can be transferred between different minds through the use of language.

But what of word choice? Well, my advice is to just do the best you can. Words are slippery imperfect things at the best of time for conveying meaning, and even when you think you've got them pinned down they go and change on you. If the academics, mathematicians and philosophers can't say what they really mean then how can you be expected to? I'd rather read Shakespeare myself, at least he thought he was writing something that had meaning.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

(William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)