Do you know that feeling where there's a word on the tip of your tongue, and it keeps coming to the edge of your mind before flitting away
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Hehe, you should pick up a few linguistics books, I think you'd enjoy them! I know what you mean about forgetting words - I always do it. The most annoying one I can remember was forgetting the French word for yesterday, which I've known for about 7 years... such a simple word!
Language is indeed wonderful. It's interesting when one word has several meanings - experiments with children show that children don't like one word to have multiple meanings, and try to invent a new word for each new meaning if that's not the case. As adults, we're great at telling from context what a word means, so it's never really a problem. Even if a word means two different things of the same grammatical function, for example two nouns, we understand what is meant - "would you like a mint? Yes please, I'd love to print some money". That never happens. And a word never seems to mean two things that are easily confused, either.
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Language is indeed wonderful. It's interesting when one word has several meanings - experiments with children show that children don't like one word to have multiple meanings, and try to invent a new word for each new meaning if that's not the case. As adults, we're great at telling from context what a word means, so it's never really a problem. Even if a word means two different things of the same grammatical function, for example two nouns, we understand what is meant - "would you like a mint? Yes please, I'd love to print some money". That never happens. And a word never seems to mean two things that are easily confused, either.
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