Sigh. Well it seems that the great white hope has bit the dust too so I'll guess I'll just continue on alone.
Bitter pill. I wish to high hell that someone somewhere gave a swinging damn.
Ok let's take an apple. An apple is good food so maybe the earliests of linguists had a name for it and that name might have been "yum". But of course one yum is not all yums because some yums are rotten and other yums are straight.
The point here is that no apple is exactly the same as any other apple but for economy our language compromises the differences.
(this is an important thought, otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned it.)
Rotten apples, red apples, sour apples, wormy apples, little green apples, love apples, and so forth. We have more words for apple than the now defunct Eskimos had for snow.
Are they words or phrases? Go ask a German...they are "thoughtunits".
Now there is another class of words that have use only in the context of a social imperative. These are abstractions like "love" "honor" and "obey".
Remember this and remember it well in case I am struck down from this board for heresy or trolling...
NO WORDS HAVE ABSOLUTE MEANING, BUT ALL WORDS HAVE ABSOLUTE FUNCTION And no. The meaning of words is not "absolute function?
