A Word Does Not Mean Just One Thing

Even if you've never given it much thought, you're probably aware that word can have multiple meanings. Occasionally, that's the cause of some misunderstandings, and such multiple meanings make much of our humor possible.

Here are some sentences that illustrate some of the meanings the word bar can have (and this is definitely not even the most striking example possible:

• We went into the bar.
• He walked up to the bar.
• A large number of gold bars are stored at Fort Knox.
• She might not have found a mate because she sets the bar too high.
• At one time, one's religion could have been a bar to membership in some clubs.
• She was admitted to the bar a few months ago.
• The lab experiment was conducted at a pressure of 0.8 bars.
• She spent 18 months behind bars.
  

And there are words with even more meanings than bar.

People who have learned only a certain amount of a foreign language—say, French—and then go to France, may be astonished to find that words are used differently from what they are used to. This can be a case of multiple meanings of the word, or sometimes the word being used with a slang sense.

This happened to me in France. I was riding a train, and one of the others in my compartment (all French people) asked me if I had gotten my bottle of water at the boite. Well, I knew boite only in the sense of 'box'. Turns out it also means a snack bar. (Typically, you don't learn slang terms in school.)

This phenomenon of polysemy, as it's called, gives the lie to anyone who thinks that interpretation a written text (such as the Bible or the law) is simple and straightforward. How many times do you hear, "It means what it says"? If only it were that simple.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein