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HERE WE GO AGAIN: MAPS, TERRITORIES, INTERPRETATIONS, AND THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN “THE” AND “A” OR “AN”
Author(s) -
Shazer Steve
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
journal of marital and family therapy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.868
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1752-0606
pISSN - 0194-472X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1752-0606.1991.tb00882.x
Subject(s) - word (group theory) , psychology , alice (programming language) , word length , linguistics , social psychology , history , philosophy , art history
Humpty Dumpty was dead wrong when he said, “When I use a word hellip; it means just what I choose it to mean‐neither more nor less.”“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things” (Carroll, 1972, p. 90). And Humpty Dumpty was quite right when he continued, “The question is hellip; which is to be master‐that's all” (Carroll, 1972, p. 90). And the answer is, it is the word that is master not its user. A word always means more and less than we, as users, as authors, mean it to mean.