we bind our thoughts in linguistic prisons,
confining them to stencils of semantic.
thought is fluid and chimaeric; prolific,
birthing twin siblings of homophone and homonym.
mental concepts dance and flitter, bridging
the lacunae betwixt a meaning and its shades
(for shade is shadow, and a spirit is a shade;
thus is a spirit of usage also a shade of meaning).
words are as diamond lattice, transparent entrapments
within which we cage these gleeful shapeshifters,
limiting them to singular dimension.
The mathematical phenomenon of polysemy, the ambiguity of an individual word or phrase that can be used in different contexts to express two or more different meanings, has been observed to be a strange loop.
ReplyDeleteAt the denotational level, the term refers to situations where a single entity can be seen to mean more than one mathematical object. See Tanenbaum (1999).