Who Is Harm?

 

Who is Harm?

A friend of mine told his young son that they needed to move something “out of harm’s way.” With the wonderful curiosity of childhood, the boy asked: “Who is Harm?” He quite understandably defined harm as a person.

We’d say the word means something like “physical injury, hurt, damage,” to use Wiktionary’s definition.

Some words are more difficult to define, especially abstract concepts. Try telling your 4-year-old what love or art or poetry means.

If you asked me to define torque, I’d steer you to a dictionary. Or how about the word itch?

Also difficult to define are the definite and indefinite articles: the, an and a.

Same with fillers we use in speech, like um, like and you know. These words provide what linguists call structural cues.

Think for example of people you know who pepper their speech with like. That brings us to a related issue: the difference between a word’s definition (its “semantic meaning,” to be technical), versus its function in a sentence. We know that like means having similar qualities. (“He’s behaving like a thug.”) But how about its use in these sentences: “So I’m like, ‘No way’” and “It was like ten miles.”  A website offering writing tips for students says that like in contexts like these “Cushions an assertion, introduces direct speech or thoughts, or marks an approximation.” But defining like in these contexts isn’t easy.

In each case, a good communicator omits like and rewords the sentence if necessary.

Other tricky words to define are prepositions. Native English speakers can easily tell how to use to, on and by, but not when they should or why. Much of English depends on idiomatic usage. There’s no special reason for saying “Dinner’s on the table,” not “Dinner’s by the table.”

Dinner’s ready? Time for eat.

[300 words]