Disengaging the Interwoven Ramifications of Categories of Words

   1) Words and Images

   Words are but the images of matter... to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture. (Bacon, 1878, p. 120)

   2) The First Symbols of the Child Are Word- Sentences Designating Action

   Chamberlin, Tracy, Dewey, Binet and others have shown that the child's symbols are action-words, i.e., their content is action. There is also practically universal agreement on the fact that the first symbols of the child are in reality word-sentences designating action and object or subject, or all three at once. (Markey, 1928, p. 50)

   3) The Relation of Words to Conceptual Development

   The child can very readily learn at the age of three that "right" and "left" each refers to a side of the body-but ah me, which one?... What is set up first is a conceptual organization. By the age of six the word "right" clearly and immediately means sidedness to the child. A considerable conceptual elaboration has already occurred, and the stimulus effectively arouses that structure; but it arouses no prompt, specific response.... With such facts, it becomes nonsense to explain man's conceptual development as exclusively consisting of verbal associations. (Hebb, 1949, p. 118)

   4) Words Are the Means by Which We Form All Our Abstractions

   The use of language is not confined to its being the medium through which we communicate ideas to one another.... Words are the instrument by which we form all our abstractions, by which we fashion and embody our ideas, and by which we are enabled to glide along a series of premises and conclusions with a rapidity so great as to leave in memory no trace of the successive steps of this process; and we remain unconscious of how much we owe to this. (Roget, quoted in Minsky, 1986, p. 197)

   5) Disengaging the Interwoven Ramifications of Categories of Words

   Any attempt at a philosophical arrangement under categories of the words of our language must reveal the fact that it is impossible to separate and circumscribe the several groups by absolutely distinct boundaries. Were we to disengage their interwoven ramifications, and seek to confine every word to its main or original meaning, we should find some secondary meaning has become so firmly associated with many words and phrases, that to sever the alliance would be to deprive our language of the richness due to an infinity of natural adaptations. (Roget, quoted in Minsky, 1986, p. 206)