I remember trying to write to my grandchildren. Words are plentiful but it seems that a great cloud of related words is required to carry sense from one person to another. My brother maintained a demand for defining your terms in conversation. This kind of precision is impossible. One cannot encode words like trust and truth. The closest we get is in science and mathematics, but we know now that at the base of reality, there is not a bunch of little balls in a billiard game where any degree of determinism can be applied with ultimate certainty.
Hence the need for a canon with which to measure our words. A canon is a body of tradition and text in which some group of humans places their trust. It is the Greek word for measure from which we also get our word 'cane'.
The conclusion is that words are part of a semantic field. Like electrons, they are neither particle nor wave but both. Words live and have their sense in a semantic field, just as electrons and photons exist in an electromagnetic field.
