What do words mean?

A good friend of mine once asked me why I studied English Literature at Princeton, and why anyone studied English at all. We speak it — what more is there to say about it?

I replied, vaguely and ponderingly at the time, that the study of English can be useful in its predictive power. Words have an effect on its recipient. It can be useful to have a good idea of the cause-and-effect relationship between words and readers.

I wrote many essays to this end. For example: an author who uses the word, “ponderingly,” encourages the reader to interpret the text with humor and thoughtfulness (The reader may pause to ask: is that even a word?).

However, the older I get and the more notes that I compare with others, the more that I realize that words mean very different things to different people.

A friend of mine told me, the other day, that I was “different” from other people. It felt like an accusation that shook me to the core; on a different day, from a different person, with a different mindset, it could be the greatest compliment I could receive.

I’ve been asked by a science-minded friend about English:

If you want an actual answer, why don’t you run an experiment — ask N people to read a text and report their interpretation?

I suppose that’s one way of doing it — of figuring out what words mean, on average. Another way is that of the English major: proposing a theory of cause and effect, and seeing how it holds up in the face of academic criticism.

I suspect that no matter what, since everyone is a little different, we’ll always be a little wrong about what things mean.

Terse syntax, for example, could have emotional implications from the sender. Maybe they are mad at you. Or maybe they look communicating concisely and precisely. Who knows?

At the end of the day, all we can really do is take our best guesses, ask questions, revise our interpretations, and learn how to communicate with each other — one person at a time, one word at a time.