"I want to kill you" could be entirely sarcastic in meaning, a part-joke that comes from genuine seething, or a serious, unironic expression of the desire to murder someone. Which one is it in a given case? You could never fucking tell from the words themselves, or else they could not convey each of these meanings in different contexts! Saying you want to have a bat could mean that you want either a baseball bat or the flying creature that generally is nocturnal and capable of using echolocation. Does the word gay refer specifically to a homosexual man, or to men or women with a homosexual orientation, or to a person experiencing happiness? In some cases or in different eras, it could mean any of these things. The reason why some words like this shift in generally intended meaning over time is only possible because someone, at some point, simply made up an additional or new meaning for a word, just as by logical necessity happened with the first human words of any language.
Words have no special, intrinsic meaning. This is what makes them flexible. However, if they are flexible, then there is no such thing as a single valid definition for many words some consider rigid; there are only definitions that are consistent with themselves and a person's other definitions, which must be conceptually accurate in light of the laws of logic to be "accurate" words. It is whatever concepts or other reality, such as logical necessities or introspective states of mind, that the language is supposed to communicate that are true or false, verifiable or unverifiable. Words are just words, mere sounds or symbols. If an alien language was to feature a word that sounds like "cat" in English, it would absolutely not be the case that this necessarily means the same thing, either in its general societal usage or in an individual extraterrestrial's intentions, as what I would mean by the same word.
People who have trouble looking past mere words to ideas or wanting to do so--perhaps because they think this is too abstract, intimidating, unfamiliar, or effort-consuming (as if this makes it any less true that words are not what any rational person focuses on)--are of course idiots. This will still, beyond holding them back from understanding either language or the concepts language refers to as they really are, impact how people interact with other people. Rather than use reason and concepts to illuminate the real nature of language, they approach this in the inverse direction while still actually talking and acting as if they can in any way reach knowledge of the truth, and they might hate or dismiss anyone pushes back against their linguistic reductionism or conceptual apathy. There are only additional layers of stupidity involved when people assume things that are neither said nor implied given the wording of a statement. Otherwise, they would not be able to assume, for it would be known (though one can never know what the words of others are intended to mean, only what they seem to be intended to mean).
With something like the Bible, it absolutely does not follow (for many other reasons as well), even aside from the many verses that clarify such things, that Biblical statements like "Husbands, love your wives" (Ephesians 5:25) or "The person to be cleansed must wash his clothes, shave off all his hair and bathe with water" (Leviticus 14:8) are really about gender-specific obligations [1]. If I say women are people, it does not mean I am saying men are not people; if the Bible says not to murder a man, it would not mean murder of women is permissible (Exodus 21:12)! With religious texts, proponents and opponents alike are just usually too stupid to recognize logical and linguistic nuance. A verse might say one thing but be perfectly consistent with a broader or unmentioned concept, or another passage makes it as clear as language can, which is never to the point of absolute certainty, that it is not the case that, for instance, only wives deserve love from only husbands. Yes, other verses directly teach as much (Leviticus 19:18, Romans 13:8-10, Titus 2:4, Genesis 1:26-27), but nothing in the wording requires that Paul meant wives are not to love their husbands or that this is less important than the other way around. Another miscellaneous example is that it does not follow from Genesis saying God created Adam and Eve that he did not simultaneously or subsequently create other humans directly.
There are two categories of people who would deny any of this: irrationalistic but aimless fools whose philosophical incompetence is far greater than they have ever dared to realize or irrationalistic fools who have some particular goal in mind by endorsing misconceptions about language. For the latter category, words might make someone feel alive or empowered. They might also make someone feel safe in accepting/committing to or rejecting a worldview (like Christianity) based on what is ultimately assumptions about language. As someone who is both fascinated by language as a philosophical subject and the way I and others use words, in light of these grand truths, I appreciate words, but I do not crave them as supposedly spectacular things in themselves, nor do I care about honoring linguistic trends just to fit in with others. I also know fully that nothing I hear or read from anyone else is truly knowable for me in its meaning beyond perceptions of the seeming intentions. Within this, there is still a great amount of context and evidence that can be found for a given meaning, yet the flexibility of language even within a historical period or specific person's lexicon is there.
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