Words typically represent much more than we first face them to be. They don’t have one set meaning, but they represent a feeling, an emotion. Every person has a different feeling or emotion for different words. Words with similar dictionary definitions take on different meanings. Justice and fairness—now there’s a pair that we seem to constantly pair up. Justice is to be fair and to have fairness is to have justice. Those two words, however, represent different emotions and different feelings for, of course, different people.

Both of these feelings (of “justice” and “fairness”), however, have been subjected the nightmare all living languages must bear, which is to throw those feelings in a certain set amount of letters (in languages that use the Latin alphabet, anyway) with a certain spelling, a certain way of pronouncing it, and a certain way to write it down, and we end up with a word.

It’s not really just a word, however.

It’s a box.

Like our choices and judgments, these “words” (feelings and emotions) outgrow their boxes after time. Take “love.” The complexity of this emotion (literally) manifests itself in word form, with some languages having many different ways to express this feeling.

What fairness meant to us as children probably doesn’t mean the same thing as it does for us today—nor do any of the other words. As our morals and beliefs, our choices and judgments, our character and personality grow and expand, as those aspects of our lives tear down the walls of their box and expand to form new walls, these words do as well.

I felt like spending time to understand words themselves is very important, and not just the fact that the meaning may change for us, but especially that different people may believe these words to mean different things. They aren’t defined differently, but they take on a different emotion and a different feeling.