Locke and the Abuse of Language

When reading Tuesday’s reading assignments, Locke’s An Essay on Human Understanding particularly intrigued me, because I have always wondered where words originated from, how they derived their meaning, and how one word can have multiple meanings.  According to Locke, these are all examples of the abuse of language.  A word doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone because of these abuses.  The six abuses he describes are:

• People use words without really knowing what they mean
• People use words inconsistently, constantly contradicting themselves
• People try to recycle old words and apply them to current circumstances without defining them
• People believe words represent actual things and not ideas
• People purposefully use words incorrectly and try to give them new meaning
• When exploiting the 5 abuses above, people assume that others know what they are saying

I found abuse #4 particularly interesting.  Locke says everything in this world is a “thing,” and we group these different things to create general ideas.  We then create a word for this particular idea, because having a particular word for every different thing would create too much confusion.  \

Locke says that figurative and metaphorical language is a product of abusive language and further enables it.  At first I didn’t agree with this, because figurative and metaphorical language is so beautiful and has so much meaning behind it, but after I thought about that, I realized that that is Locke’s exact point. Words don’t have their original meanings anymore because of eloquent language.  Because of these abuses, rhetoric has a bad name.  So many people abuse language and rhetoric, and unfortunately important and famous people do, like our politicians.