Words And Other Things

I think that, as a young man, I had the notion that the communication of meaning depended on the precision of words. It is a typically Western notion. I thought that timing and spacing, gestures and inferences, and various kinds of nuances were daft notions that didn't come into play, or shouldn't. I would think that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was an example of that -- until his friend Piero Sraffa essentially said, What about this? and showed him a gesture.