A blizzard, a rhino, and the secret to framing.

Call a spade a spade. Or call it a three-year old deer, a eunuch, or the gunk in the corner of your eye.

Years ago, a Dartmouth student named Emily Hill got caught in a blizzard while on a bus tour in the mountains of China. Being an experienced outdoorswoman and the only passenger who could speak Cantonese, Emily helped lead the others to safety without serious injury, except for some cases of frostbite. Two weeks later, Emily was gored by a rhinoceros while hiking through Nepal's Royal Chitwan Park. As you might have guessed, she was a hardy young woman, and she recovered quickly. Within a week, Jane Pauley of The Today Show was interviewing Emily in Nepal and her relieved parents in Kansas City over a satellite link.

Emily later told me she was struck by the different reactions between friends of her parents back in Kansas City, and her fellow Dartmouth students. Her parents’ friends said, “See what happens when you let your daughter wander abroad?” Meanwhile, back on campus, students moaned, “Man, I wish I’d had such an experience!”

Talk about different audiences. Each one set the Emily incident in a wildly different frame. Defining an issue forms a key aspect of framing, a system that allows you to gain the high ground of any subject.

Framing starts with the definition of the issue. In rhetoric, your control of an issue’s meaning can help you steer an argument. When you find yourself embroiled in a confrontation, a great way to throw your opponent off balance is to ask, “What’s this really about?” and then suggest a different definition.

Suppose your significant other goes ballistic about the way you load the dishwasher. If you reply, “What’s this really about?” you’re deftly asking for the frame. Is this spat about your dishwasher loading failure, or about something that happened to the poor goof at work?

Your control of meanings can help you define your own ethos. Elon Musk isn’t just a weird and nasty billionaire, he’s a futurist pioneer! You don’t work at a job, you work for a cause! Sure, that work may entail an endless round of mind-numbing meetings, but you’re also advancing civilization by helping the economy, or enhancing knowledge, or keeping order through…don’t call it paperwork, call it communicative organization.

Here’s where we often run into trouble. We tend to use terms thoughtlessly. We vote for a candidate who promises to create jobs. Great, but what’s a job? Merely a source of income? Why can’t that candidate push for laws that provide incomes without work? According to Elon Musk, that would be doable given enough robots. But robots take away our jobs. Or is a job simply work you have to do most days? In which case, is parenting a job? Did enslaved people have jobs? Do robots?

This kind of rabbit-hole cogitation can be extremely annoying, even disturbing. You might say it literally cost Socrates, the original definition sleuth, his life. Why not just call a spade a spade?

A spade is a gardening tool, clearly. But in a police procedural it can be a deadly weapon, a piece of evidence, or a clue. A spade can be a symbol on a playing card. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a spade can be “the gummy or wax-like matter secreted at the corner of the eye,” a eunuch, the act of removing a female animal’s ovaries, or “a male deer in its third year.” And still we expect people to call the spade what it is. The Greek historian Plutarch writes scornfully of the enemy Macedonians:

Phillipus answered that the Macedonians were fellows of no fine wit in their terms, but altogether gross, clubbish, and rustical, as they who had not the wit to call a spade by any other name than a spade.

Sure, call a spade a spade. Or, if you prefer, call anyone who insists on calling a spade a spade “gross, clubbish, and rustical.” Emily Hill’s elders saw one spade. The spade her classmates pictured was a very different implement.

The importance of meaning in rhetoric helps explain why I love the Oxford English Dictionary with a geek’s abiding passion. Like any serious writer, I need a guiltfree form of procrastination, and the OED provides it. There are few better ways than to look up words in the OED—in my case a condensed version in two volumes, with type so small the package includes a magnifying glass. (In a previous post, I used it for fun with constitutions.)

I bought the dictionary fifty years ago, using all the money earned from busing tables in my college’s dining hall. Looking up a word in those hefty tomes gives its meaning an oracular quality. Go ahead and consult an AI for your etymology; in my OED I feel as if I’m calling on Calliope, the muse of eloquence. (Not that I’m a total Luddite about the dictionary; I also use the online version.)

While my passion for the dictionary might seem eccentric or even annoying (or so my wife will remind me after a dinner party), there is method to this etymological madness. All of philosophy and rhetoric began with the meaning of words. In the Bible, labeling reality became the first human act. After God created Adam, he formed birds and beasts from the ground; then the deity brought them straight to the man to see what he would name them. The book of Genesis goes on to say that Adam and Eve’s descendants spoke “one language with the same words.” They settled in a land called Shinar and built a great city with a brick tower so high it reached the heavens. God came to take a gander.

And the LORD said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”

God took extreme measures, demoting his clever species by breaking up the one language into many, confusing the people so that they couldn’t cooperate on that threatening creation. According to the Bible, the place became known as Babel, from the Hebrew word balal, meaning “confusion.”

Even when we technically speak the same language, we humans tend to create our own confused, post-tower Babel by attaching different meanings to the same words. Just look at politics, where “freedom,” “liberty,” “democracy,” “the economy,” and even “America” veer to the left and right.

The word “meaning” itself can cause Babel-level confusion. What should we do to make our lives more “meaningful”? Check every item off our bucket list? Gain the highest rank at work? Win a Nobel Prize? Find love? These might be worthy goals, but what do they have to do with meaning? Before we can begin to make our plans, we really should settle on the meaning of meaning.

The early philosophers focused on meaning as a way of understanding reality and their place within it. Socrates wandered around Athens asking for meanings; the Socratic Method is all about finding definitions. Plato’s cave, whose inhabitants saw only the shadows of reality, had a Babel-esque aspect to it; our usual language often fails to see the world as it is. Plato wanted to drill through language right down to the form (eidos in Greek), the ultimate essence of everything. What, he asked, was the dogness of dogs, the mountainness of mountains, or the truest meanings of courage, love, and goodness? For that matter, what is the humanness of humans?

That last question inspired Aristotle’s theory of the soul, an individual’s ultimate character and the inspiration for my next book. Eventually, this pursuit of the truth of words led to modern branches of philosophy such as semantics, semiotics, and metaphysics. You could argue that all of philosophy is a search for meaning. Why else would anyone become a philosopher?

And why else would I hear an angelic chord in my head every time someone mentions the Oxford English Dictionary?