Words. Funny little things. They're things created to represent something else. A word is a particular noise, if spoken. A particular shape, if written. As they originate in sound, even when merely silent on the page, sound inheres in their shapes. We know that "know" and "though" rhyme, for instance, though they look quite different. There is nothing else in the world that exists as nothing but meaning. Not quite right, a word being an object, a sound. When someone utters a word in a language you don't understand or you look at a page of writing you can't read you have a sensory experience independent of meaning. With some confidence we can read emotional states expressed in spoken, sung, shouted language without being able to pin down the particularity of the meaning. A picture -- painted, photo, carved in stone -- will have meanings, more & fewer than words. "A picture is worth a thousand words." Yes, in that it takes many words to draw a picture in someone's mind, a picture that that person could draw in near approximation to the unseen original. But our little words fill up with meanings. "Love", a much-used word in this language, would take many pictures to illustrate because "love" has many meanings. Even "language" proves full of meanings when you try to pin it like a discrete insect to a board. If non-human creatures communicate and language is defined as "the medium of communication," one must assume the non-human creatures are using language. This is something that many refuse to do. Can there be communication without language? Yes, if communication is the transfer of information from one body to another. Pollen transfers information from one body to another. Is that communication? If language is merely "a" medium of communication rather than "the" medium of communication one must talk about it in relation to other media. Scent, perhaps. Or visual signaling. Are these languages? It might be most useful to use the word "language" to speak of the different media of communications. Scent languages, visual languages, spoken languages. A dog's bark. The smell of its genitals. The attitude of its tail. These are elements of information.

At the microcosm of a single word, one can dig amazingly deep. Any one of these words has its history, its accrual and rejection of meanings. As a poet I love to have the words in the poem do many things at once, get as many meanings going as I can. A fractal has the same level of detail no matter how closely you look at it, no matter how far you pull back from it. I like that in a poem.

I have thought about the law. Our society's written rules of conduct. One writes a law as precisely as possible. Unlike my ideal poem, which is loaded with meaning, a law should be stripped of meaning, stripped down until it means only one particular thing and nothing else. This may require a great many words -- the bugaboo being that with the added words one faces the additions and distractions of other meanings.

Al Franken was sued by Fox News when he titled his newest book "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: a fair and balanced look at the right". A transcript of the courtroom proceedings has been posted. I'm most amused by the following exchange betwen the judge and Fox's attorney:

THE COURT: All right. The consumer who would buy the book is a relatively sophisticated consumer, correct? I mean someone interested in political satire and commentary.

MS. HANSWIRTH: I don't agree with that, your Honor. Generally, cases hold that purchasers of books are generally not, neither sophisticated nor unsophisticated.

Ms. Hanswirth is avoiding the word "sophisticated" because, I figure, it requires a greater burden of proof. It doesn't take much to fool a dummy. But a smart person, a "sophisticated" person, an informed person can see through simple ruses. Does Franken's book fool the "sophisticated" person into confusing it with Fox News? Ms. Hanswirth wants to say the book's presentation is confusing regardless of the state of education of the person looking at it. As one is relatively easy or less easy to confuse depending on one's sophistication Ms. Hanswirth wants to avoid that whole area. Convenient for her? Distorting the world to suit a linguistic argument? She doesn't want to say a sophisticated person would be confused because every person who thinks himself mildly sophisticated but yet unfooled would find her argument dubious if not ridiculous. "By that cover it's obvious Franken is criticizing Fox News. What's to confuse?" Neither does Ms. Hanswirth wish to say the book will fool a bunch of dummies. That would be too much like saying that Fox News watchers are a bunch of dummies. And that wouldn't look good. So they are "neither sophisticated nor unsophisticated." Which starts to sound like spiritual language. The way to go is not the way.