Just what do you mean by that?

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.
• Position: American Thought - Essay

WORDS HAVE MEANINGS, and those meanings shift with time--and within cultures; often the information subsumed within a term in one context is quite different from another. This can be the root of grave misunderstandings and, therefore, is liable to be manipulated deliberately.

An innocuous and mildly amusing example is the difference between the use of the term "ego" by pioneering neurologist Sigmund Freud, which hearkened back to its Latin meaning as the self, and the misimpression grasped by a number of students of psychology who assume that Freud, writing in the Victorian era, meant precisely what they mean by ego and therefore what they presume superego to mean. No, Virginia, "superego" is not the same as believing oneself to be totally awesome.

Another example from my professional world is "depression." To a clinician, depression is shorthand for pages of possible symptoms and complaints. It is vital that students and post-graduate interns grasp that, when a patient announces she is seeking help for her depression, we cannot take for granted what she might mean, or what she is experiencing. We have to ask, and we must ask the types of questions that elicit a fairly clear understanding of the particular physical, emotional, and cognitive phenomena that this person is labeling depression. There are, for instance, a number of people, raised to be kind and good, who never would dream of being "angry." Internally raging, they politely call the experience feeling "depressed." That is a story for another day.

In the alphabet soup of misrepresentation, three "a" words easily come to mind: absolution, access, and automatic. All three have a rich variety of meanings, and all three may be misunderstood by outsiders to certain circles, and therefore are liable to either accidental or devious misuse, or inadequate explication, for the general public.

Absolution, for example, is part of the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation, popularly referred to as confession. It is not uncommon to hear Catholics using the shorthand of, "The priest gave me absolution," and I recently read an article in our local paper which referred to the outcome of confession this same way. The problem arises because a non-Catholic reader reasonably would assume that Catholics see priests as witch doctors, shamans, or blasphemers who personally forgive sins. Only a Catholic would know that the remark, "The priest gave me absolution," is shorthand for, "The priest, acting in...