Post: The word by itself evokes for me a thick, square cedar pole standing up from, and presumably sunk down into the ground, waiting for the laundry line. Suppose you post a letter to the officer who posthumously posted your father to his army post in the post-war era.
Words and their meanings have been a hobby of mine since I read about General Semantics in the science fiction book The World of Null-A [1] by A.E. VanVogt in my teens. This discipline had a brief popularity in the mid-20th Century, and led me to the understanding that an object and its image are two distinct entities. The word is not the thing, nor a map the territory. Here’s more at Wiki [2]
Would a rose truly smell as sweet were it known as “Stench Needles”? They have made me bleed and sneeze at different times in the past. How well would “Wolf Apples” sell at the market? Actually, these fruits of a nightshade sell quite well using their Italian name, “tomatoes”.
Why do I bring this up? Well, I posit that most misunderstandings between those of different disciplines or faiths are primarily due to mismatched maps between semantic entities (things) and the language used to describe them. Unless we understand each others axioms (math term for initial, unproven assumptions), we can never fully communicate. But then, this is one point made by Erich in his Pop Quiz [3] entry.
I have literally pulled posts out of the ground and used them as beams. Had my post physically become something else? I’ve just redefined its use by 90 degrees. So a post is not so much a thing, as a definition of what you do with it. My beam still is a square cedar pole, it still bears something, and it still smells as sweet when cut short.
As I’ve decided to do with this post.
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