This community is bizarre and probably the most genuine one I’ve stumbled upon. How do I consistently get more comments then updoots here?

  • I Cast Fist
    7•2 days ago

    Theoretically, yes. In practice, no. Suppose bla becomes a everything word. If anyone asks what bla means, you say it means bla. The other person won’t understand, you persist on bla bla bla meaning bla means bla, by which bla can mean anything and you realize that it just doesn’t work, because if it “means anything”, in reality it means nothing.

  • M137
    4•2 days ago

    Than*

    • @mipadaituEnglish
      2•2 days ago

      Smurfing hell… I thought I was going to be the smartass in this thread.

  • @Siegfried
    2•2 days ago

    Yes yes, yes yes yes. Yes, yes yes yes yes, yes yes yes!

  • @yesman
    5•3 days ago

    The simple answer to your question is no. Language is as much about distinction and exclusion as it is about description. The word “circle” stands for the description and properties of the circle, but would be incoherent if it did not also exclude straight lines.

    You can often find examples where some things are considered premium or desirable not for the properties is has, but for what it lacks. Just think of all the products marketed to not have something like BPA, fat, sugar, Carbs, gluten, asbestos, lead, and even cruelty.

      • @bcgm3English
        2•2 days ago

        Some of these GIF hosts can be pretty obtuse. I was able to get at this GIF by going to the embed page and clicking/tapping the “copy link” button. In this case, the only difference in the two URLs was the file extension.

  • circuitfarmer
    12•3 days ago

    Professional academic linguist here. (Yes, that’s a thing.)

    Words have the meanings that communities apply to them. There is no governing body over word meanings. There can be a tension (e.g. two groups using the same term in different ways), but that doesn’t really mean that the word means both. Words mean different things to different groups. It has to be this way, for epistemic and pragmatic reasons.

    In that sense, meanings are not consciously assigned. So the answer to your original question could be “no”.

    But in another sense, all meanings are possible for any given meaningful sequence around the world. Which means, in principle, given infinite communities of practice, a word could have infinite meanings. A stretch, of course.

    Edit:

    There is no governing body over word meanings

    I’m speaking here in terms of global English. There are some languages that have governing bodies, or at least bodies that claim to be governing bodies, like French with the Académie Française. But this is not at all the norm.

    • @[email protected]
      5•3 days ago

      Or, to put it another way, (unprofessional academic linguist here), a word has meanings by what you mean by it, and what the listener understands it to mean.

      In a sense, it can mean anything you want it to. In another sense, it can mean anything the listener/reader interprets it as. Most useful though is when you mean the same meaning that the listener understands.

      And for “accepted/official meaning”, that’s just a community all agreeing on a meaning. Optionally with a recognised group (e.g. dictionary writer) affirming certain meanings as accepted in the community.

      • circuitfarmer
        2•3 days ago

        I think you’re getting at intended meaning versus received meaning. Which is totally a thing, but intended meaning is far less well understood than accepted meaning (not necessarily at the word level, but definitely at the sentence level).

        At the sentence level, companies pay big money to have tens of thousands of sentences manually annotated for intended meaning (to try and train AI to be able to discern it automatically).

      • circuitfarmer
        2•3 days ago

        It means I’m not a translator and I don’t work on one particular language (which is typically termed as an academic linguist), but I’m also based in industry.

  • @NegativeLookBehindEnglish
    20•4 days ago

    The the the the the, the the the the the the the the; the the the the the the.

  • LostXOR
    12•4 days ago

    Not really. A word with every meaning is meaningless itself, since it doesn’t allow you to narrow down the word’s intended meaning from the set of all possible meanings.

    • @[email protected]
      3•3 days ago

      [audience looks around] ‘What just happened?’ ‘There must be some context we’re missing.’