Because I fell in with a bad crowd at a young age, I had become accustomed to thinking of language in terms of the jobs it does (and less in terms of the “meanings” “words” “have”, long before ever falling in with another bad crowd (notably one of the gang leaders) and being more thoroughly introduced to a functionalist, i.e., non-referential, view of language. (The behaviorist / scientific-philosophical version is a little different than the linguistics version, which is actually very much to my point, now that I think about it.)

I had been thinking a lot about how best to present this viewpoint to my doctoral students. Today, a door opened very swiftly and simply: my students were feeling confused about the multiplicity of apparent definitions being given to terms like “temperament” or “personality” in their readings. So I briefly outlined the functionalist viewpoint, and noted that it probably will work better for them to treat technical terms as words that do specific jobs depending on who’s saying them, and that should not be restricted to working any specific effect on the student as the student reads them.

We shall see where it goes, but I can definitely say that I had fun today.