Words and their senses

What does "out" mean?  Well, it's the opposite of "in", whatever that may mean.  Except, not in all cases.  Sure, "I went out the door" means pretty much the opposite of "I went in the door", but "I've got an in at the State Department" means I know someone there and I might be able to use that connection to advantage, while "I have an out at the State Department" means ... maybe it means I have an escape route from my current predicament via the State Department, maybe because of the in I have there?

Just off the top of my head, "out" might mean any of a dozen things:

1. adj Unconscious ("He's out like a light")
2. adj No longer holding a position ("She's out as CEO of Frobco")
3. adj Retired as a batter according to the rules of baseball ("He's out at third")
4. n An instance of retiring a batter according to the rules of baseball ("That's the third out")
5. adj Openly known to have a particular sexual orientation ("She's an out bisexual")
6. v To reveal someone to have a particular sexual orientation ("He outed her as a bisexual")
7. v To reveal someone to have a clandestine role or identity ("The administration inadvertently outed a CIA agent")
8. adj Not a member of a particular social group ("They always make me feel so out")
9. n A potential means of escape from a situation ("In tense negotiations, it's always good to have an out")
10. adj Not in tune ("I  think your A string is out")
11. adv Deliberately in a different key and/or time signature from the rest of an ensemble ("Vernon likes to play really out when he solos")
12. adj Not at home ("Sorry, Mr. Smith is out")

and so forth.  It's easy to come up with more.  I've by no means hit even all the usual senses.  My laptop's dictionary gives nine adverbial senses, nine adjectival senses, one prepositional, three nouns and two verbs.  I've heard of lists of over a hundred senses of the word.  It depends on how finely you want to slice it.  I'll come back to that.

Clearly some of these senses are more closely related than others.  The baseball senses 3 and 4 are clearly related, with the noun sense derived from the adjective.  Senses 5, 6 and 7 are clearly related, the verb sense has got to be derived from the adjective sense, and that must be related to phrases like "the secret is out".  On the other hand, it's hard to see how senses 3 and 4 have much to do with senses 5 - 7.

Nonetheless, the use of "out" (or any other word) is not completely arbitrary.  There is a well-developed linguistic theory behind this (well, probably several, but I happen to like this particular one).  At the core, a word has a small number of well-defined senses.  In the case of "out", there is a boundary enclosing something.  What's enclosed is in.  On the other side is out.  Thus when you go out a door, you are going from the space you were in, into another space (which may also be enclosed -- you can go out of one room and into another).  You can draw a circle on the ground and say someone or something is in the circle or out of it, and so forth.

From these basic senses, we build new senses metaphorically.  We can imagine a boundary between the members of a social group and anyone out of the group.  We can talk about entering or leaving a state of being ("Moishe led us out of slavery"), and so forth.

Crucially, these metaphors are not just literary fancy.  They are directly meaningful and productive (in the linguistic sense that we can spontaneously create new instances of the metaphor).  If a social group has a boundary, we don't just say someone is in the group or out of it.  We can welcome someone in.  We can kick someone out.  We can expand the group.  We can designate an inner circle, and so forth.  If we're feeling more creative, we can say something that sounds more "metaphorical" in the usual sense ("The boundaries of the group were porous.  People floated in and out with the tides.")

In the case of "out" we can start with the basic boundary-oriented sense and build, well, outwards:

• A container can have something in it, and you can take things out of it
• If the container holds a fluid, you can pour it out of the container
• or it can run out (or flow out, our seep out, or pour out)
• When there's no longer anything in the container, you have run out of whatever was in it (or you're just out of it)
• Any resource can be considered to be a fluid, so you can run out of time (or say time is running out), run out of money, or energy, or whatever.
• The resource need not be physical.  You can run out of patience.
• A burning lamp or candle consumes its oil or wax.  When there's none left -- it has run out -- the lamp or candle has burned out.
• Likewise, any flame can burn out as it runs out of fuel, for example a rocket can burn out
• Someone exhausted is burned out
• An electric light performs the same role as a lamp or candle.  When you shut off the current to it, it is out.
• A person's consciousness is likened to a light or flame, and an unconscious person is out (sense 1 above).  You can also drift in and out of consciousness, but that's considering a state of being as something bounded -- a separate metaphor.

Coming back toward the core senses

• A social group or position is a bounded area, metaphorically.
• As noted above, one can be in or out of a group or position, or leave it (senses 2 and 8; also, being in a job or out of it, leaving a job, etc.)
• Information can be regarded as a substance (you can share it, hide it, have a lot or a little of it, etc.).  You can't see through an opaque container, but once the information is out of the container (out in the open), others can know it (senses 5-7 ... the secret is out)
• Obviously, you can be in or out of your home (sense 12)
• We can speak of some quantity being within or outside of given limits, a special case of a state of being as a bounded area.
• A note too far from its correct pitch is out of tune (sense 10)
• A musician diverging from the key and/or time signature of a piece is clearly crossing those limits (sense 11)
• A difficult situation limits one's potential actions, like being in a confined space.  It's good to have a way out of such a space (sense 9)

That leaves baseball.  The baseball usage derives from the game of cricket, where a batsman stands in his ground, guarding a wicket.  When the wicket falls (for any of a number or reasons I won't even try to enumerate), the batsman is out of his ground, or just out  (well, you can also be out of your ground but not out, for example if you're running between the wickets, but clearly out is related to in/out of one's ground).

So there you have it.  By a series of metaphors and analogies, we can connect seemingly unrelated senses of a word, like senses 1, 4 and 7 above, back to basic, familiar and physically-based concepts.

Of course, if you try hard enough, you can connect anything to anything.  I remember learning the following chain of reasoning as a kid, explaining why fire engines were red, starting with a very basic premise:

• 1+1 = 2
• 2+2 = 4
• 4+4 = 8
• 8+4 = 12
• There are 12 inches in a ruler (at least in the US)
• Queen Mary was a ruler
• The Queen Mary was a ship
• Ships sail in the ocean
• The ocean is full of fish
• Fish have fins
• The Finns fought the Russians
• Russians are red (this was back in the Cold War days)
• Fire engines are always rushin'
• And that's why fire engines are red

If only fire engines were still red.

How do we know that this whole sense-extension exercise isn't just another chain of silly reasoning?  A metaphor doesn't just relate anything to anything else.  There are two basic rules:

• One thing will be more concrete than the other.  E.g., holding a substance in a container is more concrete than holding information in one's mind.
• The metaphor connects the two things coherently, in multiple places.  You can bring things you know about the more concrete thing to the more abstract thing, at least until the metaphor breaks down.  In an example from a previous post "The stop sign was a fire engine" is not a coherent metaphor, even if both are red.  On the other hand, if you have information in your head, you can give it out.  You can have a lot or a little of it.  You can have information crammed into your head until it's about to explode, and so forth.

Even if the explanation above isn't airtight, I hope I've at least presented a plausible case that the senses in which we use words can be explained reasonably well by this sort of metaphoric extension, plus some other rules covering, for example, how we convert adjectival senses like sense 3 to noun senses like sense 4.  Real linguists have, of course, studied this in much more detail.

How many senses does a word have?  Some, like copernicium or Pinophyta, probably only have one, but even highly technical terms like algebraic can have multiple, related senses, following the same core-with-extensions pattern as anything else.  Some very basic words, like the prepositions or head and go have large numbers even by the relatively conservative standards of dictionaries, particularly when you count idioms like head out or go out.  Most words we commonly use have at least a few widely-used senses, and likely several more specialized senses, particularly if you include slang -- which you always should, if you're really trying to understand a language.

But how finely should we really slice?  Senses 6 and 7 above are very nearly the same thing.  Historically, as far as I'm aware, sense 6 precedes sense 7, but is this because outing someone's orientation is a different thing from outing someone's clandestine role, or because the sense of "revealing something that had been secret" was at first only applied to orientation?

I would lean toward that latter, if only for practical reasons.  Otherwise we would have to consider each application of a word its own sense.  Being out of the position of CEO would be a different sense from being out of the position of vice president, or janitor.

All right, then, but then couldn't we argue that all uses of "out" are just different applications of the basic idea of being outside a boundary?  It seems clear that there's something in common at the core of the various senses above, but saying that they're all just uses of the same basic word leaves something out [ahem].

This is especially apparent if you're trying to paraphrase or translate a word.  In senses 6 or 7, we can use basically the same paraphrase: He revealed her to be bisexual; The administration inadvertently revealed the identity of a CIA agent, and sense 5, apart from using a different part of speech, more or less works.  She's a revealed bisexual sounds a bit funny, but it at least makes sense, as opposed to He's revealed like a light for sense 1, or He's revealed at third for sense 3.  On the other hand The secret is revealed works fine for The secret is out.  The paraphrase test isn't foolproof, but it seems like a good starting point.

From the point of view of metaphors, a sense of a word corresponds to a particular metaphor.  Senses 5-7 and The secret is out use the metaphor of information being a substance in an opaque container.  Sense 1 uses a series of metaphors:  consciousness is a light, lights can be out because lamps and candles have fuel and fuel can run out.  If different paraphrases or translations are different ways of expressing the metaphor, then the paraphrase test makes sense.  In short, if you're applying the same metaphor in a new context, you're using the word in the same sense, and if you're not, you're not.