Many readers of the writings of Lewis Carroll will be familiar with the following dialogue in Through the Looking Glass:
Humpty Dumpty: "When I use a
word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
Alice: "The question is
whether you can make words mean so many different things."
Humpty Dumpty: "The question
is which is to be master—that's all."
We depend on sharing meanings of words with those around us.
Where there are no shared meanings, there is no way of communicating an idea, a
request or an order to someone else. In our complex and technologically
advanced society, new words are constantly coined and old words repurposed,
which in turn can cause uncertainty and confusion. Primo Levi points out (“The
Scribe”, in Other People’s Trades) that there has been a shift in the
way we give meaning to words. Definition used to involve the identification of
a new or unfamiliar word and the use of familiar words to convey its meaning.
More recently we have taken to the redeployment of familiar words (‘mouse’, ‘window’,
‘notebook’) in contexts where the words that explain them may be less familiar to
the enquirer after their meaning (e.g. ‘hand-operated computer device used to
control an on-screen cursor’).
Hillel, at Avot 2:5, teaches the Tannaitic position on the
meaning of words:
אַל תֹּאמַר
דָּבָר שֶׁאִי אֶפְשַׁר לִשְׁמֽוֹעַ שֶׁסּוֹפוֹ לְהִשָּׁמַע
Do not say something that it is impossible to understand, when its
objective is to be understood.
Ironically, this teaching—despite
its brevity, simplicity and apparent lack of ambiguity—is taken to mean
different things by different scholars. The understanding preferred by the
Chabad website, for example, is “Do not say something that ought not to be
heard …, for ultimately it will be heard” (an interpretation supported by the
Me’iri). Another surprising interpretation is that of Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner (Ru’ach
Chaim): one shouldn’t say of one’s friend’s words that they cannot be
understood in case they later come to be understood.
Hillel’s teaching implicitly
incorporates an understanding of the context and the nature of the addressee.
This is because שֶׁאִי אֶפְשַׁר לִשְׁמֽוֹעַ (“impossible to
understand”) suggests that the possibility of understanding is determined by
the level of the addressee’s comprehension. Thus an explanation of Einstein’s
theory of relativity might reasonably be understood and appreciated by an
audience of scientists but not by a troupe of kindergarten kids.
In his teaching, Hillel
is conveying a further message: that there is no point in wasting one’s breath
on an uncomprehending audience. This can be annoying and vexatious for the speaker
and might cause not just frustration but a loss of temper. If you’re not going
to make your words count, don’t say them. This fits in with the advice of the
first of the two Rabban Shimons who populate the end of the first perek:
כָל
הַמַּרְבֶּה דְבָרִים מֵבִיא חֵטְא
Everyone who increases speech brings sin.
In the sixth perek we
also have the lengthy baraita (Avot 6:6) that lists the 48 ways to acquire
Torah, of which the third is בַּעֲרִיכַת שְׂפָתַֽיִם (“by articulate speech”). This term is broad enough to cover almost
anything one can think of, which takes us back to Alice’s question: are we
really entitled to make these words mean whatever we want? Since the baraita gives
us no indication of who spoke these words to whom, and we have only the wide
and general context of acquiring Torah, arguably it is open to each of us to be
the “master” of בַּעֲרִיכַת שְׂפָתַֽיִם and give these
words whatever meaning we want.
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