Should words have just one meaning or more than one meaning? Or: a linguistic exploration of board culture.

I'm sure most all of you are familiar with ambiguity from your English classes. Someone says "let the flow go," and you know it can either mean to let the flow be free and do its own flow thing or to forget about the flow and stop trying to control this- then you understand from the two meanings that the only way to let the flow be free and do the flow thing is if you stop worrying about it.

Straying away from anything more English class-ey, let's explore everyone's favorite word:

Gnarly 

When you hear "gnarly" you probably get some IMAGES of California surfer dudes with blonde hair transferred into your BRAIN (but obviously if we don't see the same pictures, I've got you with  some gnarly videos). "Gnarly" (in culture) generally has two definitions.

1) Something gross/gnarled/repulsive

2) Something impressive/incredible/ground-breaking

If "gnarly" had only one meaning, where would all the fun be in life? You wouldn't know if I was talking about bot flies coming out of peoples eyes or Danny Davis using all his money to shift snow around and invite the greatest (living) snowboarders to give their chops a go. Think of the adrenaline rush!

So besides making your life more confusing/annoying/difficult to use Google Translate/whatever, words having two meanings makes the world more exciting. Obviously "gnarly" is a very shallow example, but if you go into poetry, the double meanings of words don't make it more confusing, but add twice as much imagery to half the character count. It makes language an inconvenience on a surface level, but the ambiguity is what changes it from a grammatical formula to a form of artistic expression.

Are there reasons to be skeptical of your knowledge claims? Or: an exploration of musical emotion through the icon of your elementary school general music class.

Of course... Unless you think you are absolutely positive that you really know everything you know. Even the things that everybody knows, maybe none of it is true because everything we learned is a human construct... like numbers and math and emotions. There's a bunch of vague words that sound like they are only coincidentally insightful (because if you're vague enough, you can sound like you know anything). For example, from a musical standpoint (because it's the only thing I think I can form a decent example out of in the middle of the night), its "known" that major chords/arpeggios/scales/pieces are happy, and minor chords/arpeggios/scales/pieces are sad. Maybe light and dark would be better phrasing than happy and sad - although "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" is a "dark" piece because it is in a minor key, many people are made happy by listening to minor, darker songs. For most people, the chords in a piece like "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor", reflect images of... that one Disney Halloween movie, while the chords and melodies in a piece like "Carnival of the Animals" seem cheerful, light, and carefree. Is the knowledge of the mood of a piece really something we can know, or have the connotations of major-happy, minor-sad, been implanted into us since we were children watching Fantasia 2000 three times every year in elementary general music class? Often times, when we listen to music, that music has words, so through that many of us begin to associate a different tone of words with different musical modes, but when we remove words from music (See Fantasia examples above! Elementary school music has prepared you for this moment!), those emotions still remain. We have been told and (I dare say, most of us) believe, that the majorness/minorness of a song is representative of its happiness/sadness, but do we believe that this knowledge is something that is fundamentally implanted in the human brain, or is this knowledge we have been trained to believe and have acquired through the knowledge of a language? Are sad songs actually... sad?

Questions?

Do you think that if people could prove plant emotion that there would be less vegetarians/vegans in the world because somehow taking the life of an animal would be just as bad as taking that of a plant?

We already have legislation in place protecting certain animals and plants. If plants could be proven to have feelings, how do you believe society will change, if at all?

Staring directly as the sun, physically, is a disadvantage to people. Metaphorically speaking, name a situation where "staring at the sun" is harmful.