War, Words and Manufactured Meaning

Re “The Scream of a Dying Word Is an Awful Sound,” Commentary, April 30: Not to beg the question, but is it an oxymoron when Peter Garrison states that “a world without meaning would be intolerable”? After all, there are multiple meanings for all things. Different languages employ different words to represent the world in different ways; as tongues slip and slide from continent to continent and culture to culture, so do ontological and theological perspectives. Meanings collide like too many cymbals in an orchestra pit.

Perhaps what’s worse than a world without meaning is a man-made hell where meaning is manufactured, co-opted, privatized and taken for granted. But enough about the Bush administration and its war against Iraq; Garrison wishes to discuss “dying words.”

Ben Miles

Huntington Beach

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I would like to add the following to Garrison’s list of dying words and phrases which do not (or did not) mean what people think: Enormity (which does not mean “enormousness”); parameters (which does not mean “perimeters”). I could care less (which does not mean “I couldn’t care less”).

John Hamilton Scott

Sherman Oaks