Words are little communisms

By Charles Brown The following reminded me of one of the unique characteristics of language: meaningless things , individual sounds , letters-phonemes that are meaningless , refer to nothing , are combined to make words that have meaning .

“Hofstadter had previously expressed disappointment with how Gödel, Escher, Bach, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for general nonfiction, was received. In the preface to its 20th anniversary edition, Hofstadter laments that the book was perceived as a hodgepodge of neat things with no central theme. He states: "GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?"[1]”

//////////////////////////////////////\\\\\\\ Charles : Duality of Patterning Distinctive sounds, called phonemes, are arbitrary and have no meaning. But humans can string these sounds in an infinite number of ways to create meaning via words and sentences.

Phonemes-letters ( meaningless things ) are to words-combination of phonemes ( meaningful) as individual humans-selves ( meaningless ) are to groups of humans ( meaningful ) . Meaning is inherently communication or communist . Words are little communisms .