What defines anything?

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I am going to assume you meant “what makes words mean things?” and not “what is the definition of ‘anything’?”

I love questions like this. Semantics is the study of meaning.

Let’s start simple and work up. If you hold one finger out and point to an apple with the other hand, then I might intuit that you want one apple. There’s quite a bit of context that has to be read to infer your meaning. A lot of that context revolves around basic human behavior. If you had pointed at a bridge instead, I would have not guessed that you wanted me to give you exactly one bridge. Maybe instead you want one ticket to cross the bridge.

In the beginning, and you see this with animals too, the entire community, through watching and learning from others, settles on the meanings of grunts and gestures. Eventually we worked on our grunts until they could become utterances. Eventually the utterances became words.

At some point our language diverged significantly from animal communication. Words started to gain multiple meanings. Our brains made semantic connections that enhanced the utility of language.

So what makes the word “run” mean “to move swiftly” rather than “a round vessel or cask?” Well, languages evolve over time. The way we use language shifts. Not too long ago, the primary way we communicated over long distances was by hand-writing out letters. Nowadays we send texts. The language we use has to adapt to the medium. Texting used to have a limitation of 80 characters. Telegrams used to be billed by the character / word.

So you see similar ‘compression’ techniques used in both settings. Language compression means you have to have more shared context before a message can ‘land’. The shortest telegram in the English language was from the Irish writer Oscar Wilde. He was living in Paris and he cabled his publisher in Britain to see how his new book was doing. The message read: “?” The publisher cabled back: “!”

What ‘?’ and ‘!’ meant was extremely context-dependent. So it is with every word. You can’t just go by what the dictionary says. You also have to take into account everything else about that particular word, including the person saying it.

Language is one of the most direct interfaces we have to our own brains. It’s worth studying.