Again on the subject of language, and how it is much more than a means of communication, but rather a rich source of raw knowledge and culture accumulated over the years by generation after generation of native speakers...
Everyone agrees that a word generally has a "meaning". Forget about dictionaries and formal systems for now, a "meaning" is an idea that is attached to a word, agreed upon by most of those who say or hear the word. For example, the word "criminal" has a simple yet precise meaning. It means "someone who broke the criminal law". Such a word helps us separate those who broke the criminal law from those who haven't: People of the first group are "criminals" where people of the second group are not.
Consider, however, if California's criminal law was amended overnight, so that drinking coffee was decreed lawfully a crime. As a coffee addict, that would make me a "criminal" according to the above definition. Of that most people would agree. But most people would also agree that calling me a "criminal" still wouldn't make sense. It would violate the "spirit" of the word, and make the use of the word incomplete. Effectively, a coffee drinker is in a sense not a criminal, even if coffee-drinking was decreed a crime. What is going on here? Is there a problem in the way we defined the word?
I don't think so. And I'm not sure if there is a formal name for this concept I'm about to propose, but I think that every word carries more than just a "meaning". A word also carries "implications": concepts that are not associated with the word per se, yet as native speakers we are pre-conditioned to think about them in the back of our minds whenever the word is used. For example, the word "criminal" implies "evil" or "dangerous" or "wrong-doer". None of those are part of the "meaning" of the word, it simply means someone who broke the criminal law, yet the social preset here is that the criminal law itself is written so that anyone who breaks it must necessarily be an evil person (murderer, rapist, etc). Conditioned into society as kids, we absorb this social preset, enforced into the language by bindings such as criminal->evil. Such binding is always implied, never explicit.
This is why we face a dilemma when we try to express an idea such as "a person who broke the criminal law by doing something that is neither evil nor dangerous". Let's call this idea Alpha. There is simply no one word in common use that would effectively describe Alpha, because every word that means "someone who broke the criminal law" comes bundled with implications about that person being evil or dangerous.
This isn't just a benign finding, it is a major cause of a lot of problems in our world today.
The power of implication makes language much more than you'd think it is. Not just a way to communicate, but a way to DIRECT thought, and more importantly, a way to RESTRICT thought: If no word exists to describe Alpha, then a native speaker would have a hard time THINKING about an Alpha. And even if they somehow managed to summon that thought in their mind, they'd have no easy way to transport that thought from their mind to other people's minds. This severely reduces the chances of this thought surviving in the collective awareness of the masses. In terms of our example here, there can hardly be any debate about a person who committed a crime yet is a good person for doing so: Criminal law effectively dictates who is good and who is bad in the eyes of the masses, and its ruling power is built into the language itself!
Being mindful of such reality helps us better understand a lot of what's going on between different cultures in the world around us. For example, if you lived in medieval Europe you'd have a hard time finding a word for "someone who is not a believer in Christianity, yet who is a moral person". The most commonly used word would be "infidel" or "heretic", to mean "someone who is not a believer in Christianity", but those words come bundled with implications about that person's lack of moral conviction. Why? because that society happened to believe that Christianity is the only good source of morality. That belief is fossilized into their language, not by explicit decree but by subtle implication, and carried from generation to generation through this natural vessel of culture.
The power of such inborn implication would become obvious if some visionary tried to convince a gathering back in medieval Europe that people who are not believers in Christianity should be given proper respect. That someone would probably be careful not to use words such as "Infidels" or "Heretics", subconsciously attempting to dance around the implications tied to these words. But his argument would be so fragile nonetheless, because anyone can easily counter it simply by asking "Are you proposing that we start paying respect to heretics and infidels?" And the answer is yes, that is exactly what he would be proposing. But his is a lost cause, the concepts he is trying to defy are frozen solid into the very language he is trying to use to challenge those concepts. He would have no hope of changing his reality before he'd slowly thaw language itself, and extract those concepts out of it!
The examples are all around us. In Arabic you won't find a common word for "Social drinker". In fact the only common word for "someone who drinks alcohol" pretty much implies "someone with an alcohol problem". What's the cultural heritage fossilized into the language here? "Drinking is a social problem".
Regardless of whether or not you approve of homosexuality, you can still appreciate how gay rights movements faced formidable challenges initially by having to combat language itself, and undo implications frozen into every single common word you can possibly use to describe a homosexual (gay, queer, fag, ...). It must have been a long hard battle, to unthaw such concepts and pull out negative implications, effectively reinventing the words in common use, or perhaps coloring them with newer, more positive implications. Notice how the meanings of the words wouldn't change at all; only the implications.
Our world would be a much better place if people were systematically mindful of the differences in language from culture to culture, not just the meanings of words but also the implications of words, the language behind the language, and the cultural heritage that manifests itself through the use of words to unlock hidden meanings.
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