In defense of words

I'm not touching the political mess that is the November General Election, simply because while it is rife with examples of the importance of words, I can't find my hip waders and I refuse to enter the muck without them. This whole train of thought stems from my graduate work.

One of my classes this semester is Organization of Information. That seems to be pretty self explanatory right? How information is organized for retrieval. Easy as pie. Buried deep in my lecture was a note: Don't get hung up on the use of "bibliographic" to describe non-books. The term doesn't matter because we'll use it how we use it.

WHAT?!?!?!?!

For starters, I understand that bibliographic is a word that has undergone evolution-- books as such didn't really exist in Greece. However, in English, bibliography is regarding books. It's the way that Greek translates into English. No one will argue that. There's this underlying idea that the word as such doesn't matter, simply how we use it.

Words don't work like that. They just don't. If you use bibliography to mean everything but books, how will anyone know? You're violating the inherent meaning of the word. More importantly, how exactly do you intend to communicate with anyone? If words mean only what you choose them to mean, and what I choose them to mean, then how do we ever reach consensus? Realistically, politics is the perfect example of the chaos of subjective word meaning. Words have inherent meaning-- they have to. To say that you can change them at the drop of a hat, the better to fit your personal meaning is ludicrous.

Librarianship isn't the only field guilty of this particular offense, its just the one I'm in at the moment. Precision of language has fallen by the wayside, something outdated like doing your own work and realizing that you are not the center of the universe. The problem is that it shouldn't be: being exact in language shouldn't be an option for those who care.