What's in a name

I think I may have already made remarks, in one of my entries, about one of the many limitations of languages, namely that the same word may mean several different things. The other day I was confronted with it yet again while helping my 6-year-old with her homework. In the course of two simple exercises, we came across four homonyms. And of course, it didn't take her long to ask the "but why, daddy?" question. I explained (carefully avoiding complex issues of etymology and phonetic transcription) that there are only so many sounds but many many things that you want to say, so some words are used for different things. She agreed with me that it would be nice, and much less confusing, if each word were to mean just one thing.

Which reminded me of the fact that I am in a band without a name. We have been talking about the name ever since the band was formed, four months ago, and have already considered and rejected some 40-50 ideas. Some were just plain stupid, of course (proving that you do not need much of a brain to do brainstorming) but quite a few were actually okayish, but were rejected because they get significant number of hits when Googled. Not that I think we have to be absolutely unique, but still: if you want to use the web for publicity purposes, you had better make sure your band's name comes in the top few hits, and that is very hard to do if someone else already occupies that spot.

I even Googled a few less serious ideas out of curiosity (like "Thinking out loud" and "Work in Progress" - two of my trademark phrases) but they already exist.

Several centuries ago, the Swedish botanist Carl Linneaus transposed what his father had done for his family (namely adopt a permanent last name) to taxonomy by introducing binominal nomenclature, thereby virtually solving, single-handedly, the problems of homonyms in the animal and plant kingdoms. Maybe I should go one step further and do the same for band names, e.g. by always adding the origin. In the case, I could call the band "Thinking out loud in Luxembourg" or "Work in progress in Luxembourg". There is just one problem: nobody will ever hit on something like that by accident, which means you have to be well-known before you can become well-known ...

Not enough words to go round

Vocabulary, is what we need my friend
Vocabulary, is what we need
Vocabulary, is what we need, my friend
but there are not enough words to go round ...

The other day - for a reason that now escapes me, but definitely made sense at the time - I had to explain to my daughter of five what homonyms are. I find it very useful, explaining things to children, because you have to reduce things to their essence without oversimplifying. In the case of homonyms, my explanation basically came down to the observation that we do not have enough words to describe everything, so we often use the same word to mean very different things. The examples I gave to her included the Dutch word "zei" ("said"), which is pronounced exactly the same way as the pronoun "zij" (which means "she" or "her"). Luckily, she didn't ask why adults are so stupid as not to have language where each word means only one thing, and there is a word for each thing, because that would have been impossible to explain.

Take for example two very important words: "rule" and "law". Both can be used to mean "something that naturally happens more or less the same way repeatedly", such as in "laws of nature", or - more often in the context of human society - a behavior we would like to either impose or penalize, such as in "rules of conduct". How is it that we cannot invent some words without this built-in ambiguity? Or the word right, for example, which can mean quite a few different, including "correct" (as in "I am right") and "something you can lay a claim to" ("I have the right to remain silent"). And the list goes on and on. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the 5000 most common words in the English language probably have an average of 2-3 meanings each, or more. The average is presumably a lot lower for specialist jargon, but even there, you will find this problem: the word "pitch", for example, has three different meanings in aviation alone.

So how do go about carving a masterpiece of meaning, if words are such blunt tools? The answer, of course, is by creating context, or combining words with other words. This does not completely eradicate the possibility of error, but it does reduce it significantly. In the case of the example I gave to my daughter, for example, I had to admit the theoretical possibility that someone hearing "hij zei" ("he said") might actually understand "he zij" ("he she"), but in most cases, the second combination of words wouldn't mean anything, and listeners would reject it as a possibility without even really thinking about it.

To be continued ....