Scatterbrainy

What do you mean?
- what do you mean 'what do you mean'?
I don't mean anything!
If I wanted to say something else I would have said something else.

This quote that I once jotted down from a Ukranian movie has since then been a great companion of mine.
I have used it over and over, yet it doesn't lose its sharp and witty exactness.
However, as I am reading Meaning in Interaction and becoming more imerged in truisms,
aphorisms, sophisms and metaphor, it becomes increasingly clear that the quote is not what I thought.
In fact, it is saying something much deeper than what I first imagined.

Meaning is relative.
Meaning is derived and imposed by each by way of symbols, shared experience and collective images.
It is not that people don't say what they mean or don't mean what they say.
But that meaning is never absolute.
Meaning is nothing.
Yet, sometimes, meaning becomes everything (yes, semi-creating aphorisms on my own now)

The Economist recently published an article where the long with-standing truism that the limits of language are actually the limits of your mind was celebrated as hard scientific fact. All evidence and proof.
How, then, can I demand from you that your meaning will transcend to mine?
That your mind be synchronized with my own?
How do I suppose that confusing your psychology with my own is in any way helpful?

Well, touché to the Greek, to James Geary and all the other great sociolinguists that constantly challenge our perception of language, the mind and hence, the universe and our existence.



Now I've done my share of intellectual and labourious efforts for this week.
Detaching for a family weekend.
Visual evidence may pop up.