created, 2025-13-01 & modified, =this.modified
tags:conceptslanguage
A word is an elegy to what it signifies Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass
NOTE
I might be just floating around in ignorance here. I know I have tools in the past which discuss this more eloquently.
How do you measure the collective stability of a concept or a word?
If I have a contextually ascertained idea of a concept (say a broom) and you do as well (your broom, which I might say “tis broom”) and we compare them over the course of years how will they change?
What of more nebulous, concepts that are being refined at the edges of knowledge?
My random example of a broom. There was a first utterance of the word broom, and the conceptualization of a broom that make it (a device that was useful for sleeping1 and had properties like that).
But even this idea of a broom is different. The modern broom is different than those first brooms, though the function is mostly the same (there might be refinement in broom research which makes it better at the task.)
Footnotes
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I meant to type sweeping here, but wrote sleeping. I’ll keep it as an example of unintended drift, where I am imagining the broom being a device for sleeping. Maybe the world of words evolved in such a manner, because we are never sure precisely what to say. ↩