Bill asked me something about this, so I thought I might as well post here roughly what I said to him. What interested me here was nothing to do with the politics – read the words I actually posted, people, don’t make assumptions or WAGs about what you may believe I think. I don’t much like Scalia’s view of the world, but I respect his ability to use language.

I wanted to pursue the idea that language could be viewed as something like a stream – not of fixed meaning and immutable but fluid and always changing. I think we all freely recognise this about specific words – take the way the meaning of ‘nice’ has flip-flopped for example – but it then gets really interesting when you apply the same logic to a complete text. If we know the individual constituents of the sentences can change their connotations and also eventually their denotative meaning over time, it must follow that the meaning of complete sentences can and will change in the light of our experience over time.

Yet this must at some point conflict with our need for some degree of fixed ‘reality’, and perhaps this comes into sharpest relief in the arenas of law or moral expressions. After all, our day to day experience is based on the assumption that the law passed yesterday by congress is understood to mean ‘x’ today and will still mean ‘x’ tomorrow. This case brought home to me the fact that actually there is bound to be a growing tension over time, so the only real issue is where the boundary lies, as questioned by Scalia. So I thought it would be interesting to see what everyone else thought about the language issue.


I agree with your first two propositions, Mr Milum. I don’t agree with your third, unless by evolution you only mean change rather than the frequent connotation of ‘change for the better’, and I am unsure what you mean by a cultural truth. I agree with F’s revision for #4. I disagree with your #5 – it seems to me that the ways in which language are used are far more diverse than the role you are trying to assign to it. Some of these functions are about social coherence, and some are about social exclusion; some of them are about defining common purposes and some are about defining individual identity as separate from group identity completely.

TEd, I'm not at all clear where you're coming from - you ask us to keep the focus, then talk at some length abut matters that have absolutely no direct bearing on the thread's original topic.

Finally, may I respectfully suggest that separate queries about words could be more usefully taken to a new thread? Pursuing two or more simultaneous conversations is likely to make it even more chaotic than normal around here... ;)