Is one way to define a word, to choose the word closest to its meaning and add distinctive qualities?

Question

I'm trying to help people express themselves better, where they start with a thought or feeling inside their head, and then find the best word that matches it, before adding distinctive qualities. So in a sense, they are starting with their own definition/description of what they are thinking and feeling...until they find the word that matches it. Then they can type that into search engines like OneLook to see if they can find better/more concise ways to express themselves.

This seems especially helpful with words like 'normal' that have more than one meaning--wordnet provides two that match so closely, there's no way of knowing which one is intended most of the time; one means to 'conform' and the other means 'near average.' So, helping people 'define' the meanings of the words they use seems like a very important skill to me, and the 'find the closest word and then add distinctive qualities' seems reasonable. I'm asking because I'm clearly not a lexicographer....

Answer 1

From a communicative perspective, defining words is counterproductive, because we don't distribute our personal word-definitions to those that we speak to. For example, "glory" can be defined as "a nice knock-down argument", and while someone might object that that isn't how glory is defined, I would simply maintain that a word means just what I choose it to mean.

Instead of striving to define words, one might strive to discover how others define words, and then select words according to that knowledge. Hence the words "bad" and "sick" have different meanings, depending on communicative context. Even the meaning of something as concrete as "dog" varies contextually.

You might try to define "normal" as "typical" plus something (I don't know what), but do you believe that everybody already knows the normal (standard, most general) meaning of "typical"? I think people already know the core meaning of "normal" and "typical" etc. but they probably have varying experiences with actual usage, so they may use a word inappropriately in a given context. Rather than adding words, we need an ever-evolving encyclopedia of contextual meaning: the connotation stuff.