"The map is not the territory."

--Alfred Korzybski, founder of General Semantics

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."

- Lewis Carroll, 1832 - 1898

Meaning: The half of the conversation you can hear when someone is talking on their cellphone.

"Yeah, I'm on my way home." "That's funny." "Uh-huh." "What? No! I thought you were - " "Oh, ok."

Listening to someone talk on a cell phone can be very annoying. A new study published in Psychological Science found out why: Hearing just one side of a conversation is much more distracting than hearing both sides and reduces our attention in other tasks.

From Latin. in = not + cognito = known

Example sentence: "Some celebrities travel incognito to avoid recognition by fans and photographers."

"When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world." -- George Washington Carver

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Often, and especially during political campaigns, you'll hear words like these:

Freedom, love, liberty, justice, honesty, education, success, victory, failure, "the American people"

What do these words really mean? Take the word freedom, for example. For some folks, it mainly means "to be free from harassment by law enforcement officers." For others, "to be free to exclude certain ethnic groups from my business." Still others, "to be free from government regulations." And so on it goes.

Why the different meanings? Because these highly abstract words mean whatever they trigger in your mind. They are like ink blot tests and mean what the receiver thinks that they mean, or wants them to mean.

The scholar Michael Calvin McGee identified several examples of ideographs or virtue words in political discourse, such as "liberty," "property," "freedom of speech," "religion," and "equality."

In each case, the term does not have a specific referent. It is in their mutability that virtue words have such rhetorical power. If the definition of a term such as "equality" can be stretched, it creates a positive "halo effect" and therefore provides a potent persuasive tool for the political speaker. (Or, for that matter, for the ordinary converser.)

Another way to think about "how words really mean" is with the analogy of maps to territories, which describes the relationship between an object and a representation of that object. Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybskiheld that many people do confuse maps with territories, that is, they confuse models of reality with reality itself.

For clarity of meaning, Korzybski devised a word "ladder of abstraction" from the most abstract ideas down to the most concrete objects. (He recommended being concrete.) Here is a graphic of such a ladder:

Years ago, I drove around Europe with a friend. My friend held the road map as I drove. We sometimes quarreled over which was the correct route because I had prior experience driving in various European cities, and my partner did not. I knew and recalled how they were laid out. I stuck with my experience of the territory and my map-reader insisted I was wrong. (I was usually correct.)

If, when conversing with others, you use high-level abstractions, you increase the chance of being misunderstood. Then you may argue back and forth without discovering that you have quite different meanings for the words you use. If you discuss religion, it may not occur to you that your own meaning of "sin" differs greatly from the other's.

In a court of law, or even in a high school debate tournament, you can't get away with using high-level abstractions. In those settings you must specify what you mean and then provide evidence.

However, specificity seems not to be required for many bloviators on talk radio, those who shout out emotionally-loaded abstract virtue words like "Real American" and "Free Enterprise" and "vicious words" like "Socialism."

You can do better than that. You can be rational, civil, and clear. To be clear, you must use words that specify what you intend.

Have I made myself clear?

Loren Ekroth ©2012, all rights reserved

Loren Ekroth, Ph.D. is a specialist in human communication and a national expert on conversation for business and social life.