amusedI know that in my writing, I am even worse than Humpty-Dumpty, who claimed that a word means exactly what he wants it to mean. I don't even claim THAT.
In my writing, a word may represent a metaphor or set of metaphors that rely entirely on information that is not available in the text.
In everyday speech, we often use words or phrases that refer to a meta-context, something about the immediate situation in which the words are spoken. Linguists are forever chasing down those odd constructions, trying to give them a denotation rather than their connotation, if I have those words right.
