It's 7am. I tried going to sleep three times tonight, but I just couldn't turn my brain off, so I've consigned myself to napping a bit this afternoon and crashing hard tomorrow tonight. Er, today night. Tonight. Whatever.
I was reminded recently of the phrase "a day late and a dollar short." It's a good one.
I also got to thinking about the meaning of meaning. (Whoa, hang on.. who does this guy think he is, waxing philosophic on the "meaning of meaning"? Sheesh.)
If you're done rolling your eyes and you're still with me, here's what I mean by the meaning of meaning. (Yeah, now I'm just milking it.) When we're exposed to something, we think about it and come to some conclusions as a result of it, and then we call those conclusions the "meaning" of the thing. As a trivial example, when I hear someone speak the words "what time is it," I think about them and conclude that this person wants to know the time of day; that is the "meaning" of the words spoken.
Of course, most things aren't so straightforward. Even in that example, there are other layers of inference going on; even as I process the meaning of the words and react, I'm also pondering related questions, such as "Why does this person want to know the time of day? Are they implying that it's time for me to do something?" Already, this simple question is leading us into shades of implication and judgement, and most of the things we say to eachother are far more nuanced.
Sometimes, those subtexts are consistent and well-known enough that there's little risk of confusion. "Why don't you do this" doesn't actually mean "explain the reasons that you are not doing this," it means "I instruct you to do this." "Terminate with extreme prejudice" doesn't mean "finish up what you're doing and try to be unfairly judgemental about it," it just means "kill." These are familiar imprecisions, and they don't faze us.
But sometimes the subtexts are less obvious. "Gee, I'd love to, but I'm just so busy lately" might mean "I call on your patience, as a friend, to understand that I need to neglect you for awhile," but then again, it might mean "I don't think you're worth my time, but I'm not willing to admit it (to you, or to myself, or both)." Lately, I've noticed that "justice" seems often to mean "excuses to hurt people we don't like and protect people we do like, even when they're effectively doing the same things," and "freedom" now just means "that word that will make you go along with what I want, because if you don't I'll say you're against freedom;" very thorny indeed.
All of this is just dealing with language, beyond which there's a whole universe of actions, behaviors and expressions, each with enough subtleties to study for a lifetime. A person and a gun are simply two objects in space, but it makes quite a bit of difference in meaning if they're pointing the gun at a tin can, or at a bird, or at themselves, or at you.
And then, not only do we convey a vast depth of meaning in all of our conscious and subconscious words and actions, but we can even convey meaning through complete inaction; I find that particularly intriguing, that there are times and situations in which taking no action and speaking no word can carry as much meaning as a Shakespearean monologue.
But the real trick is, since most of the meaning is in subtexts, most of the meaning is subjective; a crowd of people may hear the same words spoken at the same moment, and each of them interpret them differently and draw different conclusions about their real meaning. When we translate our ideas into words (or actions, or whatever), we hope that everyone else understands our language the same way we do and the words will inspire the same thoughts in their heads, but it's never exact. For every thought spoken, a hundred tones of nuance and value and impression are formed in each listener's mind, and we can never really predict what they'll be. Usually it's close enough, but there's always the danger that the margins of error will all compound in the wrong way and lead to a catastrophically different interpretation than was intended.
I suppose that's why, after five thousand years, human cultures are still making war on eachother, why friends and lovers still quarrel, why human existence is what it is.
Now it's 8am; breakfast, or bed?
