Meaning

" 'Meaning' is a harlot among words; it is a temptress who can seduce the writer or speaker from the path of intellectual chastity. There are many like her. Our language is filled with such words of easy virtue; words like 'true,' 'value,' 'instinct,' 'entity.' These are everyday words, and their ambiguity is such that high–sounding statements may easily be made, having little content.'

Why don't people write like this anymore?

"...most words do not stand in such unique relationship with simple things...,nouns such as 'democracy,' 'civilization,' 'education,' have different significance to different conditions and classes of men; nouns like 'freedom' and 'happiness' are interpreted differently by almost every individual. Indeed, with continued use a good many words have lost their significance and no longer act as symbols of specific things, or even of specific ideas. Some have become verbal emortive stimulants, arousing passion without reason, bemusing or stiffening the hearer into attitudes. Words such as 'Fascist,' 'Communist,' 'nigger,' 'bitch,' " and I might add 'idiot,' "are bandied aboutas mere terms of abuse, without thought to their formal significance."

Frankfurt might refer to the latter as 'bullshit,' the use of words without regard for the truth, though instances of such words may often lack an 'intent to deceive'.

The above two quotes are from the chapter "On Signs, Language and Communication" in Colin Cherry's book On Human Communication (MIT, 1966) that I am reading for my Thinking through literature class.

side-note: There's been much excitement of late surrounding the possibility that telecommunications companies may some day introduce tiered internet speeds for content providers. This could lead to, for example, finding yourself more inclined to use MSN as a search engine than Google because Microsoft has ponied up for faster service. Opponents of such a possibility are lobbying the American Congress to add a 'network neutrality' clause into the soon-to-be revamped Telecommunications act. AT&T and Bell, in particular, have responded that they need to introduce price discrimination in order to pay for network upgrades. It seems to me that there are two things that haven't been much talked about. We don't really have 'network neutrality' at present. Sure, big companies with big servers and good connections can provide content at roughly equivalent speeds—and this does create a situation where the merit of provided content is largely determinant of traffic, which is good—but if I put up my own widgets for sale site and, for lack of capital, can only serve it with a crappy little provider, even if I make spendiflerous widgets, I shall be limited in the amount of traffic I can receive. In fact, my web-site shall most surely go off-line at some point if the traffic gets too high and I have not ponied up some more cash. Second, could the telecommunication companies not return to charging end-users a network traffic rate? Or how about such a rate for content-providers? Indeed, I think such rates exist. AT&T and Bell have simply dug themselves a hole, probably by offering companies like Google and Yahoo far too much bandwidth for too little money, and probably failing to anticipate increases in bandwidth usage as more and more of us download videos and music. (The last sentence is entirely conjecture.)