Most normal people when reading the title would probably be a little confused. Their definitions of the word house don’t include something that can write a blog post, and so they might say that I am incorrect. Or just crazy.
Let me tell you a story.
The Story
My brother, my sister, and I spent a lot of time together, as you might imagine. One of the things we did during this time was play card games. At some point while playing these games, one of us called one of the best cards in the game a house. I no longer remember which card it was, who said this, or why. But what I do know is that from then on, the word house had a new meaning for us. If we called someone a house it meant they were awesome. If I housed my brother in a game, that meant I soundly beat him.
We don’t really use the word house like that around anyone else. Because we don’t want them to think we are crazy(Why am I doing this again?) but the word house will always have a different meaning for me than it does for most other people.
Am I Wrong?
Now, I have this crazy theory. This comes from no real outside source that I can think of, and may be something that makes no sense(besides being crazy, I am also insecure of my ideas). But here it is:
You can’t use something external to prove that my set of definitions is wrong.
There are many things you can prove about my definitions:
- That they are internally inconsistent
- That nobody else uses them
- That I don’t use them
- That they make communication hard or impossible
- That it’s not part of the English language
- That it’s not in the dictionary
- That you don’t like them
- That they aren’t useful
- That they are useful
- That I shouldn’t use them
But I don’t think it’s logical to say that “That’s not what the word means!”
Well, actually, you can say “That’s not what the word means to me!”
A Korean person who heard their baby mutter the word house would have no idea that it meant awesome to me, and something you live in to all other English speakers. No, they would say it was meaningless baby talk. (This may not be true, I know nothing of Korean language or culture. Maybe house means “bird” to them.)
The sound house has NO inherent meaning.
The string of symbols H – O – U – S – E has NO inherent meaning.
Human beings give things their meaning. What does it mean that the sun came up this morning? It means exactly what we think it means. Nothing more.
Why am I mentioning this?
Two things happened recently.
One, is that I wrote this post. I tried to say how I was defining two words specifically. But I felt anxious about it, and almost didn’t post it, because, what if people don’t agree with my definitions? But then I realized that it was okay if they don’t think truth means the same thing I think it does. What is important is that they know what I mean when I use the word. Once that is clear, they can understand what I’m trying to say. This doesn’t mean I’m going to go around creating crazy definitions for all kinds of words. (well, except for house) But for those words where the common definition isn’t clear, I’ll choose a specific one I like that seems pretty close.
The other thing that happened is that Steph had some debates on his podcast and youtube. Something that seemed to annoy the people he was debating with was that he was using the wrong definitions for things like property rights. What Steph means by property rights aren’t the same as what everybody else means. Well, this could be a problem, and is something that is worth addressing. But the thing that was annoying to me was that they couldn’t tell him what definition he should use. Because, what everybody else means when they talk about property rights, well it dosen’t exist. It’s one of those terms that means different things to different people. But in order to have a productive debate, you’ll need to agree on some specific definition of the word.
Debating My Definitions
If you don’t like my definitions, that is fine. You can show me where they contradict themselves, or how they aren’t useful. But especially for things like love, and truth, and knowledge, and freedom, please don’t just tell me I’m wrong and not give me something to replace it with. I just don’t think either of us will get much out of such an interaction.
Oh yeah, and even now that you know what I mean, you may still disagree with me about the whole “I am a house” thing. That’s okay, since you’re wrong :)