Words beyond words

kw: musings, words, definitions

Reading Kluge, which I reviewed yesterday, got me thinking about language. While we may have the largest number of words in the English language, there aren't actually enough of them. How else to explain the large number of words with multiple meanings? These are a source of puns, plus plenty of confusion.

One of my favorites is the word display. According to my big desk dictionary (Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary, the unabridged Second Edition), the word has:

• 5 meanings as a transitive Verb (one that takes an object: "…to display a coat of arms…")
  
• 2 meanings as an intransitive Verb (no object: "…Picasso displayed last week…")
• 5 meanings as a Noun ("I brought a display of widgets.")
• and it can be used as an Adjective ("…a display card…")

This isn't the English word most prolific of meanings. The entries for cover takes up three times the column space, having 20 transitive and 3 intransitive Verbal uses, 9 Noun uses, and at least a dozen separate entries for Adjective uses such as "cover girl".

When we talk about a "word", is display one word or twelve? Is cover really thirty-plus words? It is for reasons such as these that I once proposed to a standards-making group of which I was briefly a part, that a set of unambiguous codes be invented for unique meanings, which would upon completion greatly facilitate automatic translation of documents.

Thus the word word can be a slippery concept. No wonder we need specialists to write the deathly dull, but unambiguous documents that convey agreements, treaties and contracts. It just doesn't come naturally, folks!