ONE truism about language is stated most succinctly in the introduction to Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary: 'Meaning does not truly reside within the word but in the minds of those who hear or read it.'

This is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because the phonemes or speech sounds we need to create words are not unlimited, so it's to our advantage that the same phoneme combinations or words can be used to mean different things. Imagine what would happen to English, for instance, if the dozen or so broad groups of meanings of the word 'hand' — not to mention the scores of prepositional phrases and idioms that use it — were to suddenly vanish from the language. Speakers of English would be desperately scrounging around for hundreds of new phoneme combinations for the well-established denotations and connotations of 'hand'!