The Malleability Of Language

The objective nature of language, knowable by anyone who looks to reason itself without making assumptions, is that there is no such thing as a word with an inherent meaning.  All linguistic meaning in a cultural sense relates to customs that could have differed and all linguistic meaning in a personal sense reduces down to what a specific writer or speaker intends.  Since every culture is comprised of individual people, the former sense is only an extension of the latter, for even the broadest and most conventional norms of a language only have that status because individual people tend to use the same words in the seemingly same way despite words having no meaning other than that which is intended by them (however, concepts are objectively fixed and do not change).  In light of this, societal language patterns only last as long as people voluntarily use them.  At the same time, even within the same language, era, and culture, the same word can have numerous intended meanings.

This is why a word like demon has come to refer specifically to fallen angels by Christians in a Biblical context, to malicious spirits in a broader sense in art or in the context of certain non-Christian spiritual worldviews, to personal trials that psychologically torment people (difficult situations or just undesired emotional states themselves could be the concept here), or perhaps even to an exotic animal of extreme size or ferocity.  Demon refers almost universally to something negative, but these are all very distinct intended meanings in other ways.  This is only one of a vast number of examples of how the same word, complete with identical spelling and pronunciation as well, can be used within the same culture in ways that are not interchangeable and are quite unrelated on some levels.

For a less directly philosophically charged concept than those behind the common usage of the word demon, there are words like bat.  Two different noun forms of the word bat refer either to a sports tool used to hit an incoming ball or to a biological creature associated with echolocation and caves (though not all of them are supposed to live in caves).  However, it is spelled the same in either case and is pronounced without any distinction in the sound of the spoken word.  At some point, like with words such as demon, the word bat came to be used in reference to very different concepts without one meaning totally replacing another.  Both meanings simultaneously survived.  The sheer randomness that plays a part in assigning symbols or sounds to a given concept or experience is on full display in this case as well as in others.

If words did not have arbitrary meaning, spelling, and sounding--things that are part of their inherent nature even apart from centuries of linguistic social conventions and that can be known from pure reason without specifically dwelling on particular long-standing societal trends--they would never come to have different meanings over time or be used with multiple definitions in the same regions and generations.  This arbitrariness is unlike the necessary truths of logic, which by necessity cannot be false and do not change no matter what words are used to communicate them.  If someone wants to know the true nature of reality, at least the logical truths that can be known, he or she must look past language to actual truths, ideas, and experiences in order to not allow language rather than reason and introspection to shape their worldview.  The necessity of logical truths and the fixed nature of concepts do not share the malleability of language.