Understanding The Nature Of Language

Everyone who reads or speaks is already familiar with some sort of language.  Though it is wholly unnecessary and absolutely dangerous for non-rationalists, some people even think using language instead of just conceiving of abstract concepts or visualizing mental imagery--the danger comes from thinking words are necessary for thought, when one must already be able to think to create or learn words to start with, or in thinking that there are no truths that precedes words, for reason and all else that is objectively true must already be true for words to be assigned to them.  Ignoring these or other facts, such as how there cannot be such a thing as inherent meaning to a word, some people go so far as to hold that familiarity with the technical lexicon of a subject or the words for, ironically, categories of other words (like indirect objects) is needed to understand language, and in turn that language is somehow needed to know reason and introspection or concepts like that of God or morality.

You do not need to know what onomatopoeia means or be familiar with the definition of the phrase coordinate adjective to understand language.  You can know the function of a subject and verb without recalling the terms and can know the seeming intended meaning of a word, even having never formally studied linguistics at any level.  Language is useful between people only as a means of communication more precise than the even greater vagueness of gestures and grunts, and everyone from young children to the elderly can at least somewhat grasp what people seem to mean without knowing the words to call many things, like the future perfect tense or etymology.  There are people who subjectively are fascinated with history or culture and they might not like this.  They also might actively prioritize the metaphysically secondary, epistemologically useless (at actually revealing other minds) nature of language, social interactions, or historical records over things like logical necessities.  After all, they would never think words have inherent meaning or are vital to understanding miscellaneous concepts if they were rational, even very abstract concepts like logical axioms, the uncaused cause, moral obligation, scientific epistemology, and so on.

What is self-evident (the basic truth of axioms and the existence of one's own mind), what follows from this, or what one immediately perceives are knowable, just not on the basis of random words that one has to invent or learn in order to describe what is already true.  There is not even any set of symbols that automatically fits a particular idea except in the context of a linguistic system that can only be arbitrary at the core.  Words are neither necessary truths nor found in the natural world. They are nothing but constructs of minds or cultures used for a utilitarian purpose (with an end goal) for communication or out of personal infatuation.  No examples are necessary for this to be true by necessity, and none are required to know this with absolute certainty, but there are many examples stemming from the already-fixed truth of how words are purely arbitrary constructs.  The word terminal, as one instance, could in the English language refer to a part of a battery, an airport, or the lethality of a condition (a terminal illness).  

Even on the level of what more unexamined experience points to, none of these things is the meaning of the word terminal.  It could by contemporary social patterns be used in any of these contexts, so it has no single intended concept behind it.  Still, a word with a single conventional definition has no intrinsic meaning.  There is not a single phonetic unit or written character that could escape this, and even then, if the speaker/author means something unusual or novel by a word, then that is objectively what the meaning is in this case.  People can be terrible communicators or can gratuitously use words outside the normal context of what other people seem to generally mean, but their words mean only whatever they are intended to.  People can still point out the misuse of words according to what an established but arbitrary language's norms are, but one cannot "know" what a word intrinsically means because there cannot be such a thing.  Epistemologically, there is fallible evidence in a given context that someone else's words merely mean a specific thing in probability.  With one's own words, one can just introspect to directly known without ambiguity what one means by it!

Those who regard language far above its real nature, again, might not like this.  They might love noticing patterns in historical usage of words more than actually looking to reason and concepts, which are independent of language.  They could be more interested in the relatively superficial nature of how communication can bring people together than in what is actually or seemingly being communicated.  They might be emotionalistically enamored with the potential trappings of academia's approach to language to the point of thinking people cannot know the concepts behind their own words without knowing the literally made-up linguistic conventions.  You do not need to have heard of Egyptian hieroglyphics or remember what the word phonetics means to understand language if only you are rationalistic and direct your attention to language.  As for those who would reject any of this, these people are pathetic fools, too inept or egoistic to look to the truth.