Fluidentity: This might or might not be a real word. Google couldn’t give me a definition, but it did try to help me out with a few interesting links: an impenetrably dense article in a philosophy journal that, perhaps, was about the “archaeology of morals”; a defunct blog for international art students in Italy; and a Reddit page that wanted me to confirm I was over 18 before viewing.
So, I have decided to create my own meaning for the word. Fluidentity is this: a word to describe the subtle or drastic shifts in meaning that words go through each time they are used. When you were 14 and saw your neighbor’s dog with its tail dyed pink and said, “Cool!”, the meaning you conveyed with that word was substantially different from the meaning you expressed last week when you saw a drunk businessman dancing in evening traffic and said, “Cool!” Time and context conspired to make each utterance unique in meaning.
Actually, I had decided several months ago on a meaning for fluidentity, but I had to change it. You see, I was doing some light reading on French philosophy, and you know what French philosophy always leads you to? Yes, difference. Difference between bodies and minds (Descartes), individuals and societies (Rousseau), signifiers and signifieds (de Saussure), men and “others” (de Beauvoir). And then there’s the big one: the difference between difference and différance (Derrida). When you delve into French philosophy, you learn to appreciate how it is that two academics can chat amicably on a philosophical topic for hours and then go home with two utterly exclusive opinions in their heads about what they were talking about.
For some people, entertaining intellectual dualities comes easy. (Duality implies only two courses where there could be more, so I’m oversimplifying, but bear with me, please. I have a hard enough time dealing with ... one-ality? ... is that a word?) While ordinary people want to wake up in the morning and drink their coffee and face an understandable world with words and ideas that mean basically the same as they did yesterday, intellectuals prefer to make sport out of constantly redefining concepts and the words to describe them. Take for example an assertion such as, “Pig Latin as a language game embodies the role micronarratives have in undercutting attempts to create grand unifying theories of history.” Someone like me might hear that from a person’s mouth and respond by searching for an empty barstool on the other side of the room, whereas an intellectual jouster is more likely to tap her nose and say, “Well played.” She would then take one of those words—embodies, for instance—and attach a meaning that the speaker never intended, sending the discussion off on linguistic tangents sharper than the icepick used to make her mint julep.
It might seem petty or devious to take otherwise familiar terms and thrust new nuances or meanings onto them just for intellectual fun or one-upmanship. But specialized, one-time-only meanings are nothing new to us as language users. In their classic study called Politeness (1978), Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson suggested that a phrase as farfetched as, “Oh God, I’ve got a headache again” could, under the right conditions, “convey a request [by the speaker] to borrow [the hearer’s] swimming suit” (p. 215). Imagining a scenario linking headaches to loaned swimwear requires gymnastic thinking and reminds me of the parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Here’s another one for you. Create a context that allows the first phrase to convey the second phrase’s meaning:
“There’s purple stuff growing under my right middle toenail.”
“You should vote Republican this fall.”
If regular people can utilize contextual and background knowledge to logically link together superficially disconnected phrases like these, then I suppose it makes sense that the smarter ones among us can do so with single words, at will, in a way that allows others of their ilk to track and land those logical leaps and then nod smugly at each other. It’s like they’re making giant philosophical puns.
Anyway, I am a believer in the multiverse concept of word meaning: A word means a million different things before and after a given moment, but at the point it is spoken in one unique context, it means only one thing and may never mean that again. Or, we could call it Schrödinger’s Cataphora: We don’t know what a word refers to or how it will change reality until we actually “open the box” and use it. Or we could call it fluidentity. That’s what I’ll call it for another week or so.
Reference
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1978). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.