"Worrying about defining precise meanings of words is boring and pointless, knowledge becomes swamped by language."

Essay by sstephanieHigh School, 12th grade February 2006

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Language is nothing but agreed upon symbols that enable us to enhance our communication. With that in mind, it might seem obvious at first that the specific meaning of each symbol and combination of symbols is empirical for its best use. However, there is more than one side to this argument. It can be easily argued that language shouldn't be studied in depth and defining meanings of language is pointless, if we all know it and can be made understood, then why bother with small differences in language? These affirmations, from both sides, cannot be made without the appropriate consideration to several cases and problems this might cause.

To find a suitable answer to these questions, several areas of knowledge should be considered.

One of them is science. It is very important in science that words are as accurate as possible, if not this might cause researches to be unproductive or even that medications being made have serious inaccuracies to it.

In chemistry for instance, if a certain element of a formula isn't correctly specified it might change completely the outcome.

An example where problems of knowledge is derived from both sides, the use of language too specifically and its use too loosely, is a doctor patient interaction, the doctor might have troubles to understand what problems issues the patient might be experiencing because of mal-use of language, whilst the patient might have problems understanding a doctor who uses too technical words.

One very serious problem in language is that not everyone uses the same. It varies from country to country and it has inputs of the reality that country lives in and its culture. In that case, words must be defined very specifically as to get a better understanding of a language that one does not master. Because...