Anyone who has spent any amount of time with me knows that I
am addicted to puns. I know that they
make everyone groan, but I just can’t help playing around with the various
meanings of words. I remember several
years ago going to the airport and forgetting that I had a yogurt in my
backpack. The TSA folks pulled the pack
out of the X-ray scanner and took the yogurt from me, because it violated the
rules for what you can get into an airport.
A few days later, I was complaining about this to my lab meeting, and
couldn’t resist adding, “I guess they were biased against my culture.”
For punsters, the fact that words and phrases, and sentences
can take on many meanings is a blessing.
But, why aren’t languages clearer?
Wouldn’t it be better if every word had just one meaning? That would seem to avoid a lot of problems.
There are a number of reasons why languages aren’t much
clearer than they are. I’ll focus on
just three of them.
First, words in language necessarily lose some information
about the things they describe. When you
point at a cute four-legged object on the street, and say, “Look at the dog!”
you are focused on some of its properties like having four legs, being furry,
and barking. If you said, “Look at the
poodle.” instead, then you would have added some information about it. And if you said, “Look at the animal.” then
you would have been talking more generally.
It is helpful to have these different levels for talking about objects,
but that means that from the beginning we have a choice about how specifically
or abstractly we want to talk about things.
You might think that we should always talk about things as
specifically as possible. But how
specifically should that be? For people
who know that particular poodle, they should say, “Look at Fido!” But that might not even be specific
enough. Perhaps we should have a
particular word for Fido each day, because he is a slightly different dog all
the time. Someone else who doesn’t know
that this is Fido might be better of calling it a poodle, but there might be
still other people who don’t know enough about dogs to distinguish the breed.
So, we usually try to use words that we assume everyone else will understand,
but are still specific enough to convey enough information. As Roger Brown pointed out in a classic paper
in 1958, that leads us to use words at a medium level of abstraction like dog rather than specific words like poodle or general ones like animal.
Second, even if we could settle on the way we wanted to talk
about things, it is efficient for us to be able to reuse the words and sounds
of language. This issue was discussed in
a 2012 paper by Steven Piantadosi, Harry Tily, and Edward Gibson in the journal
Cognition. As they point out, languages have thousands
of words, but a much smaller number of sounds that are used to make up those
words. Words that we use frequently,
tend to be short. That is why the most
common words like articles, prepositions, and pronouns all tend to be one and
two syllable words.
As words get more complex and are used less frequently, the
words also get longer. That is why the
word complicated is longer than the
word the. However, if every word had to be completely
unique, then some words might get very long.
As it turns out, though, in most cases it is pretty obvious what you’re
talking about, because the situation helps everyone to understand what is being
said. The word cap is used to mean a number of things including a physical hat
that someone can wear as well as a limit placed on something. While these meanings are related, they are
not identical, yet we don’t confuse them.
That allows us to re-use short words and makes our speech more
efficient.
Finally, it is helpful to be able to say things
indirectly. When you have to give
criticism, there are times when you can soften it or at least inject some humor
by speaking indirectly. Rather than
telling someone that they really messed up a situation, you can say, “This may not
have been your finest moment.” If everything
could only be conveyed in a single direct way, then there wouldn’t be
opportunities to avoid direct confrontation.
Of course, this ambiguity can lead to unintended humor. There are many examples of newspaper
headlines that must have seemed perfectly clear to editors when they were
written, but can be read in many ways.
For example, “Kids make nutritious snacks.” and “Killer sentenced to die
for second time in 10 years.” And a
colleague of mine has a great ‘recommendation letter’ in which every sentence
is one that seems positive on the surface, but could be read less positively,
like “You’ll be lucky if you can get him to work for you.”
From a practical standpoint, this means that before you send
anything out to be read by a large audience, it is useful to get someone to
read it from a fresh perspective to make sure that you haven’t missed an
alternative way of interpreting what you have just said.