Prologue – Can you pass the salt?

Geneses and apocalypses

It is a nice Summer evening and we are having dinner outside. The Sun is shining over the colourful tablecloth, there is salad from our own garden, fresh bread from our morning baking session and a tray of potato wedges sprinkled with herbs and black pepper. The crickets are chirping around us, with some competition from the frogs on the pond. We are generating our own clatter of knifes, forks and serving spoons.

And this is when it happens. Someone asks:

“Can you pass the salt, please?”

This was directed at me, so I grab the salt and hand it over. That’s it.

And no one has noticed anything.

To be honest, even I did not pay much attention. I should know better but I didn’t. I was thoughtless because being thoughtless is what humans do best. And perhaps it is not so bad, this time, nothing terrible will come out of that passing of the salt. I hope, anyway.

But for present purposes, let me tell you what actually happened.

Two worlds have been created, near perfect clones of a tiny part of reality. They merely contain my interlocutor, the salt and myself, as well as a few other random elements: perhaps a fork, the colour of the tablecloth, a birdsong, a memory, a feeling. Those worlds are entirely abstract. One lives in my head and the other in the head of my conversation partner.

Then more worlds, an avalanche of them. First, a world where the salt is now in my hand and moving across the table. This hasn’t actually happened. We are milliseconds from the original question and my eyes may just about be focusing on the correct object. But that world, the world of the passing of the salt, is already born. And not alone. There is the world where I reach out for the salt over that very hot tray on the table and burn myself. Another world where the trajectory of my hand will fully avoid the tray. Also the world where my interlocutor puts too much salt on their plate (they are known to be a salt lover) and gets some sodium-induced kidney disease in twenty years. Should I really pass that salt?

I do.

Just mere seconds after their births, the worlds are destroyed and are unlikely to be recovered ever again. Unless, perhaps, something significant happens now and scars my memory with trauma or joy.

This near-mythological event was prompted by a few words: “Can you pass the salt?” And it may be that no one paid any attention to the multiple geneses and apocalypses that occurred as a result, but doing so is a radical experience. So let us unfold it.

The meaning of small words

One may be forgiven for thinking that the important words in “Can you pass the salt?” are ‘salt’ and ‘pass’. We’ve learned it at school: nouns and verbs are the pillars of language. But those abstract descriptors of things and events are not what moves us to act in particular ways. On their own, they would in fact be pretty useless. What throws humans into turmoils; what make them sad, joyful, brave, confused; what makes them fail or succeed, hurt others or comfort them, are the little words.

Can. You. The.

Linguistic textbooks tell us that ‘can’ is a modal verb, ‘you’ an indexical and ‘the’ a definite determiner. This jargon touches upon fundamental aspects of the human mind and its relation with the world. Briefly: modals are universe creators, the cornerstones of possibility and necessity, the door to utopia and dystopia. Indexicals are the expression of our sense of self, of our position in the world and our relation to it, here and now, then and there. Determiners, their presence and their absence, direct our gaze, our actions, and very often our beliefs and prejudices.

Modality, indexicality and definiteness all have profound ramifications to a core aspect of language that linguists call intensional meaning (yes, ‘intensional’ with an ‘s’). This type of meaning is essential to our ability to represent and reason over universes: the one we live in and the ones we imagine. Without it, there would be no talking about yesterday or tomorrow, no lies and no promises, no science, no technological inventions, no legends, and of course, no passing the salt at the dinner table.

For reasons that not all my peers would approve of, I like to shorten ‘intensional meaning’ and simply refer to it as ‘meaning’. I believe it is the core of our so-called ‘semantic’ faculty, that part of language which lives above mere words and grammar, and thus, that it deserves a short, snappy name. I also think that out of all the definitions of ‘meaning’ in the scientific literature, it is the one that relates most strongly to the lay use of the term, as in ‘the meaning of life’ or ‘the meaning of our actions’. And that is the crucial point I want to make in this text: that meaning, and in particular the meaning of small words, has everything to do with our ability to act as social and political beings.

I also want to claim that our relation to language is becoming increasingly endangered. I don’t just mean ‘relation’ in the way that philosophers and sociolinguists have described it before, as a conceptual tool to describe the influence of language on the social. I mean ‘relation’ as in ‘relationship’. Do we care about our linguistic faculty? Do we feel constituted and undone by it, over and over again? Do we want to know it, love it and protect it? Or is it just a convenient thing we do when we want the salt?

In a world where little makes sense, we may well find that standing up for meaning is standing up for ourselves.

Small words kill

It is October 2025 in the Gregorian calendar. The world is burning and most of us, regardless of beliefs and political affiliations, are asking why and how, while also – fiercely – claiming we knew all along.

It is all so confusing and it was all so predictable. The current situation is due to: capitalism, immigration, climate change, the loss of values, new technologies, Covid-19, the United States of America, China, Russia, those dimwits at the European Union, how kids don’t want to work anymore, neoliberalism, how we should have spent more state money on weapons, how we should have spent more state money on healthcare. (Amongst others.)

Irrespective of political allegiance, one thing is certain: it is all their fault.

‘Fault’ is a handy word. It instantly feels us with resentment, anger, guilt, and the diffuse need to either grab a gun or book an appointment at the therapist’s. But at the end of the day, it is just a noun. Much more interesting is ‘their’. ‘Their fault’. ‘Their’ is a determiner and it holds the key to an infinitely complex mechanism (its meaning), whereby that diffuse emotion of anger or guilt finds a target in the actual world. ‘Fault’ never killed anybody but ‘their’ did. Or to use a metaphor: ‘fault’ might be a missile in its box, but ‘their’ is its purpose and its trajectory.

One could surely discuss whether it makes sense to have missiles at all, and similarly whether ‘fault’ is a useful cultural artifact. But that would mean questioning the foundation of most earthly legal systems, so I will just assume that fault and weapons are parts of what Homo Sapiens decided to do with itself and focus on their application.

As we know from real-world conflicts, the politics, strategies, logistics and actual computations that end up determining a missile trajectory are complex and more than often flawed. The same is true of the meaning of determiners, or meaning in general. There is a term in linguistics for the process that attaches parts of language to a world: interpretation function. Arguably, the interpretation function is where meaning-making happens, and it is also where things can go very wrong, ending up with an incorrect world target. Like missile trajectories, meaning can be wrongly computed, with disastrous consequences. When innocents go to prison, when relationships break over a misunderstanding, or more mundanely, when a user misinterprets the manual of a piece of machinery, there was a failure in interpretation function. A word got attached to the wrong thing.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. An often overlooked aspect of meaning is that it is computed in a speaker-dependent manner. That is, the computation happens in people’s heads, and since humanity is a decentralised system with 8 billion brains rather than a single, monolithic computing machine, the meaning of a sentence can be computed hundreds or even millions of times in potentially rather different ways. When the meaning of ‘I’ (the person that is me) says ‘their’, it may well mean something else than when the meaning of ‘you’ (the person that is you) utters ‘their’, in exactly the same sentence. When your favourite influencer says that it is all ‘their’ fault, you may well think that you are in agreement, that you feel that same rightful emotion at that same time, but do you really mean the same thing? The exact same thing? And suppose you don’t, who actually holds the truth? YouTube Man? You? Someone else? Does the difference in meaning matter?

In a multi-party political system, the factions that are not currently in power usually agree on one thing: the ruling party is doing a spectacularly lousy job. Whatever is currently going wrong in the country, it is “the government’s fault”. Do they mean the same thing? Most likely not. For one party, “the government” might refer to some new taxation policy while for the other, “the government” is the specific bunch of people who are currently under suspicion of bribery. The exact interpretation matters because it enlightens us about the individual beliefs that led to projecting blame.

In case I should be accused of giving overdue importance to the gloomy parts of the vocabulary, let us be clear that the above holds if we talk of flowers rather than missiles. Here is an obvious example: “I love you” is made of a verb (‘love’) and two indexicals (‘I’ and ‘you’). Is love real? Of course not. It is an abstraction. We use the word to describe a huge range of situations involving very different types of people, creatures, places and objects. Love is just a placeholder and let’s face it, no one can ever define it properly. But wrap it into indexicals (“I love you”), or for that matter, in something more complex like other nouns with their determiners (“My neighbour loves her cat”) and the emotion suddenly exists. It has a source, a direction, a meaning anchored in the world. Is love real? Of course it is.

Needless to say, feel-good concepts are just as finicky as bad ones and dependent on who speaks the little words around them. Most of us have experienced the situation where “I love you” can truthfully be uttered by ‘I’ but would be a lie uttered by ‘you’. Indexicals break hearts too, and rightly so. When we talk about consent, we talk about the meaning of indexicals and the meaning of sentences as uttered by the meaning of indexicals. And yes, it does matter.

Talking of meaning is good politics. It is the foundation of justified beliefs and accountability. It doesn’t entail always getting things right, but it entails having a model of the world and understanding why we associate the words of our language with parts of that world. It also forces us to recognise that another human being may have a different world model and a different way to project concepts onto that world. It makes us curious. It is the basis of living together in society and of living with ourselves.

So what happens when meaning is absent?

When a determiner kills, it is often the case that the interpretation function – the meaning-making process – was bypassed and beliefs took over. Why figure out what ‘their’ means when you already conveniently believe that something or someone deserves your anger or disappointment? Why not let the comfortable emotion rush through your body? Let out some steam? A glass falls off the table, breaks into a hundred tiny shards, and an exasperated voice addresses someone who is not even there: “It’s your fault. Why was the glass so close to the edge of the table? Why was it empty? Why this particular glass? Why was the glass even there? It’s your fault.”

Is it?

Extending our missile metaphor, failing to mean is the equivalent of slamming some red button because you were in a bad mood. A small word wraps itself around a part of reality but interpretation never happened, meaning was never created. Just a target.

If you thought botched up meanings were bad, brace yourself for no meaning. No meaning is the sheer emotional power of a noun or a verb with the directionality of an atom bomb. It radiates and burns everything in its path. It knows no one and no world. And just like the atom bomb, it is a very powerful thing.

Politicians, industrials and influencers of all kinds like to promise wealth, progress, security or freedom. They often call upon “the truth”. Their truth. But the powerful never promise meaning. It might be that they don’t really know what it is. It could also be that meaning is a very inconvenient human faculty, one that requires thinking, pausing and reflecting. One beyond beliefs and emotions, beyond oneself.

Meaning doesn’t make a crowd explode in cheers or tears. It doesn’t win elections or followers. Meaning is hungry for worlds: not just the one in that flashy advert but all the others too. It is one of those creatures that slip out of your hand as soon as you hold it too tight. And above all, it doesn’t play word games. If the rich and powerful knew about meaning, they would probably do all they can to lock it up in a box and keep it concealed, away from our sight.

Purposely or not, they are. In big style and with big money.

TBC…