more like understanding
cricket*: it is a matter of habits, acquired in oneself and rightly
presumed in others. To say that a word has a meaning is not to say that
those who use the word correctly have ever thought out what the meaning
is: the use of the word comes first, and the meaning is to be distilled
out of it by observation and analysis. Moreover, the meaning of a word
is not absolutely definite: there is always a greater or less degree of
vagueness. The meaning is an area, like a target: it may have a bull's
eye, but the outlying parts of the target are still more or less within
the meaning, in a gradually diminishing degree as we travel further from
the bull's eye. As language grows more precise, there is less and less
of the target outside the bull's eye, and the bull's eye itself grows
smaller and smaller; but the bull's eye never shrinks to a point, and
there is always a doubtful region, however small, surrounding it.**

* This point of view, extended to the analysis of "thought"
is urged with great force by J. B. Watson, both in his
"Behavior," and in "Psychology from the Standpoint of a
Behaviorist" (Lippincott. 1919), chap. ix.

** On the understanding of words, a very admirable little
book is Ribot's "Evolution of General Ideas," Open Court
Co., 1899. Ribot says (p. 131): "We learn to understand a
concept as we learn to walk, dance, fence or play a musical
instrument: it is a habit, i.e. an organized memory. General
terms cover an organized, latent knowledge which is the
hidden capital without which we should be in a state of
bankruptcy, manipulating false money or paper of no value.
General ideas are habits in the intellectual order."

A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected
by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary,
definition of "correctness." The literary definition would substitute,
for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time
ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or
write correctly.

The relation of a word to its meaning is of the nature of a causal law
governing our use of the word and our actions when we hear it used.
There is no more reason why a person who uses a word correctly should
be able to tell what it means than there is why a planet which is moving
correctly should know Kepler's laws.

To illustrate what is me