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The meaning of ``Get together'': Part 1

Every person thinks by words. Thus words are important for me, too. Especially I need to write programs to realize an idea through the words. We can easily find that one word has sometimes a few meanings. People make a joke from it. I think one word has a few meaning is quite natural. For instance, ``run'' has a few meaning. I run as I move fast by foot. I can run a shop. A movie is now running at the theater. In English, it has more meanings with a short word (run after, run away, run out, ...), however, you have already seen the ``run'' itself has a few meanings.

When we used only one language, we hardly noticed this multiple meaning of a word. However, when we learn foreign languages, we need to notice this through the translation. We can easily see one word usually has more than one translation in a dictionary. When we learn a foreign language, we can usually see the deepness of both our own language and the foreign language. In literature, especially in poems, using the double meaning of word is important. In the book 1984, Orwell describes Newspeak to restrict the people's ideas by eliminating the double meaning of the words. If you learn a modern computer language, you'll find some of the languages have a concept ``overloading.'' One name can have a few implementations. This is an adaptation to the human being uses the same word, but different meanings. If you learn mathematics, you can also notice some operators have different meaning depends on the context.

I sometimes feel the literature and mathematics share a common concept. Some people (e.g., Lewis Carroll, Noam Chomsky, ...) are good at both literature and mathematics. I would imagine they might also feel this common concept.

I sometimes feel that thinking about what I am really saying, is important since one word can have a few different meanings. I recently have an experience about this, so I will write it in the next blog article.

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