Alice in Wonderland said that words mean ‘whatever I want them to mean’. Lewis Carroll was a mathematician so he knew how much truth may lie in the absurd.
Many disputes, from personal to international are not founded on true realities but more on the different meanings ascribed to words. People are murdered because they will not give loyalty to a particular group of words.
Who owns the meanings of words? The compilers of dictionaries perhaps, but they base their conclusions on nothing more weighty than common usage.
Words and their meanings change with time, they are truly democratic, belonging to the people. Efforts by authoritarian groups and individuals to ‘own’ or control the meanings of words always fail in the end. The very ambiguity of words is also a strength a necessity and a thing of beauty, they are alive just as we are alive and evolve as we evolve.
An interesting word is ‘GOD’; There are those who define this word in ancient and simplistic ways and then write books to prove that the poor fellow does not exist. For the average educated person anthropomorphic gods are, philosophically speaking, ‘dead in the water’ anyway, so proving that an elderly gentleman is no longer sitting in the sky organising every atom in the universe does not really deserve books and fame. Wholly abstract, virtual or spiritual definitions or understandings suffice without recourse to possibilities which deny reason.
The only thing that needs to be abandoned is the use of intimidation, violence or cruelty to prove that a given definition is true, the validity of any idea is inversely proportional to the intimidation necessary to support its existence.
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