Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Linguists and philosophers have nonetheless devised Houdini-like ways of extricating themselves from the self-imposed dilemma of having to account for what words mean qua words. Head is considered a single word with a range of transferred or figurative meanings and can serve as an example of polysemy. Yet equally common words such as light are treated as a pair of homonyms—two different words having the same form in speech and writing—one of them referring to weight (as in “a light suitcase”), the other to luminosity (as in “the light of day”). The distinction between polysemy and homonymy is completely arbitrary from the point of view of language use.[42] Where the spelling is different but the sound the same, as in beat and beet, linguists switch terms and give them as examples of homophony. Yet more subdivisions can be made in the tendencies of words to drift from one meaning to another. A part can stand for a whole when you have fifty head in a flock, or the whole can stand for the part, as when you refer to a sailor walking into a bar as the arrival of the fleet. Sometimes there is or is said to be a visual analogy between the central meaning of a word and one of its extensions, as when you nose your car into a parking slot, and this is called metaphor; sometimes the extension of meaning is the supposed fruit of contiguity or physical connection, as when you knock on doors in your attempt to get a job, and this is called metonymy. The machinery of “figures of meaning,” taught for centuries as part of the now-lost tradition of rhetoric, is fun to play with, but at bottom it’s eyewash. Polysemy, homonymy, homophony, metaphor, and metonymy aren’t terms that help to understand how words mean, they’re just fuzzy ways of holding down the irresistible desire of words to mean something else. It would take a very imaginative language maven indeed to explain satisfactorily why the part of a car that covers either the engine or the luggage compartment is called a “bonnet” in the U.K. and a “hood” in the United States. Despite the enthusiasm of the large throng of hobbyists who contribute to it, the semantics of words is an intellectual mess.

All the same, most languages have words for the same kinds of things and don’t bother with words for things they don’t have or need. They tend to have separate expressions for basic orientation—(up, down, left, right—but see chapter 14 for languages that do not), for ways of moving (run, walk, jump, swim) and for directional movement (come, go, leave, arrive), for family relations (son, daughter, brother’s wife, and so on), for feelings and sensations (hot, cold, love, hate), for life events (birth, marriage, death, sickness, and health), for types of clothing, food, and animals, for physical features of the landscape, and for the cardinal numbers (up to five, ten, twelve, or sixteen). Some have words for fractional numbers, such as the German anderthalb (one and a half) or the Hindi sawa (one and a quarter)—but I don’t believe any has a separate item for the number 2.375. All languages used in societies that have wheeled vehicles have words for wheeled vehicles of various kinds, but none, as far as I know, has a single lexical item with the meaning “wheeled vehicles with chrome handlebars,” so as to refer collectively to bicycles, tricycles, tandems, mopeds, motorcycles, strollers, and lawn mowers. French may have single words for “the whole contents of a deceased sailor’s sea chest” (hardes) and “gravelly soil suitable for growing vines” (grou), but in practice all sorts of real and possible things, classes of things, actions, and feelings don’t have names in most languages. English, for instance, does not possess a designated term for the half-eaten pita bread placed in perilous balance on the top of a garden fence by an overfed squirrel that I can see right now out of my study window, but this deficiency in my vocabulary doesn’t prevent me from observing, describing, or referring to it. Conversely, the existence in Arabic of ghanam, a word that means “sheep” and “goats” without distinction, does not prevent speakers of Arabic from sorting the sheep from the goats when they need to. Just because English does not have a one-word or phrasal counterpart to the French je ne sais quoi or German Zeitgeist, it in no way prevents me from knowing how to say what these words mean. Far from providing labels for “all the things in the world,” languages restrict their word lists to an ultimately arbitrary range of states and actions, while also having means to talk about anything that comes up. The peculiar flexibility of human languages to bend themselves to new meanings is part of what makes translation not only possible but a basic aspect of language use. Using one word for another isn’t special; it’s what we do all the time. Translators just do it in two languages.