Great post, Michael. Very well thought out. I agree with a lot of it, especially the part about word definitions being arbitrary, and the part about it being absolutely necessary that communicators agree upon their definitions in the context of discussion. That said, I have a few points to make.
If words are infinitely malleable (and I agree they are), then it is impossible to
accurately define one. There will be no such thing as a factual definition of a word. Therefore, it all comes down to someone's opinion. All we can hope for is an
agreement of definition. (Luckily this works well for discussion purposes.) If it is impossible to accurately define a word, then I suggest that a dictionary is as fine a place to look as anywhere for pre-written definitions with which we can all agree.
As an example, when you asked for a definition from me a while back, I Googled it and got my list of definitions from different sources. I went through that list and found the one
I most agreed with and offered it to you. Your first response was that you didn't like my source (dictionary). I think that is an illogical response. All we need to do is agree or disagree because the source of an arbitrary definition is irrelevant. If I found the definition on the side of a cereal box, yet we could agree upon it for the purposes of our discussion, then bingo. It works. See?
IMO, dictionaries are time-savers. They prevent me from having to reinvent the wheel.
I would also question why you think dictionaries are so worthless, yet you seem to find great value in Wikipedia. It is also written by humans, but often by humans with little or no expertise in the area about which they write. (My question, in this regard, is more out of curiosity, though, because I truly believe that as long as we can agree on a definition, the source is irrelevant.)
Ok, next point.
While I think that making sure that you mean "flame" like fire and I mean "flame" like fire is absolutely necessary for a meaningful discussion, I also think this can be taken too far. If I tell you that my definition of "flame" is
a luminous body of burning gas or vapor, and your response is to ask me to define "luminous", "body", "burning", "gas", and "vapor", this is going to lead us down a bottomless pit. I think that once we agree that we are both talking about flame being the
fire kind of flame, that should be enough. Don't you? And if you disagree, please tell me where you think the definitions of definitions should end.
One last thing. I'm thinking that this whole definitions thing can be taken too far when used unnecessarily. That point is illustrated in my previous paragraph. It can also be a waste of time to demand definitions that are already clear. Let's say that I make the statement,
"I love the lighting offered by a candle's flame." It would be unreasonable (and unnecessary) for you to ask me to define
any of the words in that sentence because their
context makes it clear what I am talking about. Any further information, such as my definition of "candle", is going to be minutia, and not only will that be useless to our discussion, it will also likely be distracting and confusing as well.
So, what do you think?
