Today's post, Feel the Meaning was originally published on 13 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You think a word has a meaning, as a property of the word itself; rather than there being a label that your brain associates to a particular concept. When someone shouts, "Yikes! A tiger!", evolution would not favor an organism that thinks, "Hm... I have just heard the syllables 'Tie' and 'Grr' which my fellow tribemembers associate with their internal analogues of my own tiger concept and which aiiieeee CRUNCH CRUNCH GULP." So the brain takes a shortcut, and it seems that the meaning of tigerness is a property of the label itself. People argue about the correct meaning of a label like "sound".

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