Shellb said in part : The word *love* whether written or spoken (or shot out of a cannon for that matter) symbolises different things to everybody.

For better or worse Shellb, that's the truth. But so does the term "apple" or "snowski" or "dipstick". Such is the interaction between man and words that no word has exactly the same meaning each time we use it.
Pity.


This audacious statement brings to the fore that, underlying the present dispute we have the classic deep rift between idealists and realists. Only an attempt to bridge the gap can advance our understanding. Ideas, by themselves, are about as powerless to build a pyramid, as the DNA is to grow a baby.

As a mind game, wsieber, let us consider the Universe as determinist. Notice how the environment inputs the individual biological unit towards communal behavior through the exchange of information that is pertinent to the breeding group's continuance.
In bees this transfer is effected visually and by smell and touch by the pollen-laden returning bee's dance.
In human beings it is done with words.

( Now hold that thought)

Hey jheem, notice that wsieber used the term "audacious".
Please detail the process involved in signing that quality.

Then wordminstrel got uppity and said... I simply put words in their proper place in the continuum - somewhere in between the conception of the idea, presumably in a blaze of revelatory passion, and the execution of the idea.

Notice now, wsieber, that Wordminstrel, a romantic of the old school, has a total misconception about the nature of an idea. He refuses to accept the notion that a new "idea" is much like tsuwm's misspelled words, i.e. a mistake in symbolic association.

( Rexembxr txe fulx pagx lxtter thax wxs pasxed xbout ox thx intxrnex xith mxxspellxd woxds thxoughout txe messxge, yxt exeryxne whx rexd thxm fouxd thxm exsy xo rxad.?)

See...if this form of misspelling had a imediate cultural function it would be called a good idea and would quickly be incorporated into the cultural bag of survival tricks.
But happily, most original ideas are just bad mistakes, and time-honored social mechanisms are in place to deal with them harshly.

So wsieber, if what we call "matter" can be conceptualized as merely tiny whorls of empty space, then words can certainty be thought of as concrete objects with evolutionary function.

And they are.