The Magic of Words: Innocuous or Insidious?

This morning I was channel surfing while waiting for the Universal Sports channel to finish its infomercial and start playing the Boston Marathon live. I landed on the PBS Kids station, where Word World was playing. It is a great show, with a little jingle every time they put letters together to sound out a word. Today's word was H-A-T, hat.



There was a very cute little story about one of the characters having a H-A-T, a magician's hat, to be exact. Then the wind blew it to the next character, and it changed to a chef's hat; then it blew to the third character, where it became a silly beanie hat with a propeller on top. Behold, the magic of words: any kind of hat is still called a hat!

But that's when it started to get interesting. The first character (Sheep, if you really must know) said, "For me a hat meant a magician's hat. For Pig it meant a chef's hat. And for Duck it meant a silly hat!" That's all fine and dandy until she went on: "That's the magic of words! One word can mean different things to different people. "

Yes, H-A-T is a hat, whether it keeps you warm, keeps the sun out of your eyes, or is just for decoration. But what about when you come to abstract words, like T-R-U-T-H and R-I-G-H-T (or R-I-G-H-T-S, for that matter) and W-R-O-N-G? Do they all mean different things to different people, or is there a standard meaning for them, unchanged by our individual perspectives?

Lizzie is too young to know what any of the phonics or philosophy are about, and I'm not about to boycott PBS, but I'm that much less inclined to use the TV as a babysitter.