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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 1212640" data-attributes="member: 177">Your words don't come out with the "meaning" you intend?  Shouldn't you instead be asking what you say to me?  Sorry, but in this context that's somewhat ironic.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />But you can relax.  The phrade "you now seem to contend" wasn't an indication that you'd changed your position, but instead indicated that at a given time, I thought you meant a particular thing which hadn't been clearly stated before.Again ironic.  We sit here and write words with multiple meanings.  How can authors of more complicated works do otherwise?I dunno about infinite.  Infinite is a lot.  I'm not sure that the human mind is capable of coming up with an infinite number of concepts.  In addition, despite some schools of thought, there are some limits of reasonability on what meanings are in a text.  I don't think any rational person can say that Beowulf is about how good tomatoes are to eat.Eh.  Semantics.  Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe.  When you ask what the thing says or shows, I ask what it means.  Perhaps a matter of connotation...I choose to ask about meaning because I find your method of asking "what does it say to you" tends to neglect the cases where the author had specific messages in mind, and tends to neglect the historical framework in which the piece was written.  Your way seems to focus on the you and the now.  While that's something that ought to be looked at, it is far from complete.George Orwell had a number of messages he wanted to get across in "1984".  He certainly did not write it as mere entertainment.  And if you only talk about what it says to you now, you miss out of much of what can be gotten from the work.  Tolkien may not have had such intended meaning, but as a man of his times, but his personal commentaries on some things are there, regardless.  Asking what meanings the authro placed there, and what the work means to other people, keeps one from re-inventing the wheel, and leads one more quickly to greater understanding.</blockquote>

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