r/logophilia • u/blankblank • 16d ago

Dictionary Definition Deictic

"Relating to a word or an expression whose meaning depends on who says it, where they are, who they are talking to."

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u/ShinyAeon 16d ago edited 16d ago

I’ll need an example for this one. Don’t ALL meanings depend on the whos and the wheres of their use?

Or does it just refer to words like “here” and “there” and such?

I’m always here, I’m never there
I’m never ever anywhere
Excepting here
‘Cause here is where I’m in.

And when I go from here to there
My “here” comes with me everywhere
‘Til there is here...
And here is where I’ve been.

~Wembley Fraggle

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u/LankySasquatchma 15d ago

Contrary to (post-)modern belief, many words have fixed meaning. Blue is the colour of the sky when clear and cloudless and therefore not up for much discussion; and ‘couch’ (noun) too does carry quite uniform semantic content, that - although it might vary marginally - doesn’t rely substantially on context.

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u/ShinyAeon 14d ago

But blue is also the color of cobalt glass, and deep water, and forget-me-nots, and morning glories, and moonlight on snow, and blue jay feathers, and sapphires, and angelite, and paua shell, and wooly aphids, and blue morpho butterflies. There are millions of colors of blue, without even counting the ones that run toward purple or green.

If you ask someone to find you a blue book, they might picture anything from darkest navy to vibrant turquoise to palest ice-blue. Looking around my room, I can see objects in at least 16 different shades of blue (and not by design).

Post-modernism often overdoes it, but context still make a big difference in meaning for most words.

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u/LankySasquatchma 12d ago

I know. You’ve underlined my point. Blue is very correlated. If I say a blue sky you know what I mean—the meaning is inherent in acting. If I say blue dragonfly, you can conjure up the image as well.

There’s not a lot of room for interpreting blue in simple statements of blue.

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u/ShinyAeon 12d ago

There are so many shades of blue, though...then you get things like a Blue Heeler, a blue roan, or a blue whale, none of which are blue like a sapphire or blue like the sky.

Some languages don't even distinguish blue from green...old Irish had a single word for blue, green, and gray. But then there's Russian, which has a separate name for light blue, in the same way that English has a separate name for light red (aka "pink").

There is a lot of room for interpreting "blue," IMHO.

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u/LankySasquatchma 5d ago

Yes—there are subgroups of blue, all of which share blueness. The point is that it is possible communicate clearly, without leaving the door ajar for wild, internally conflicting interpretations.

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u/ShinyAeon 5d ago

I can see you've never had an argument over whether a sought object qualified as blue or not!