> Fortunately, we have words that convey exactly what we want. Words can be just as fuzzy as body language. Sometimes, this can be done intentionally, for dra

> Fortunately, we have words that convey exactly what we want. Words can be just as fuzzy as body language. Sometimes, this can be done intentionally, for dramatic effect (e.g. "The duke yet lives that Henry shall depose"). English can have syntactic ambiguity, which limits the understanding of a phrase. In the sentence "I saw the man on the mountain with the telescope.", was I using a telescope to see the man on the mountain, or did I observe that the man on the mountain was himself looking through a telescope? [0] Whether words are to be taken literally or metaphorically depends entirely on the context and the audience. Heck, the same word can be functioning both literally and metaphorically within the same sentence [1]. In the sentence "He took his hat and his leave", the word "took" is literal in the phrase "took his hat", but metaphorical in the phrase "took his leave". There's an entire class of errors [2] related to encoding of thoughts to speech not matching the decoding of speech to thoughts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeugma_and_syllepsis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeugma_and_syllepsis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberrant_decoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberrant_decoding Edit: This may have come off a bit harsh, but that was not my intent. I had the same understanding ten years ago, that the uncertainty of communication can only be shackled by the rigidity of language. I found that I had built my house upon sand, for there is nothing sturdy to be found within language, and seekers will find only chaos and descriptivism.