Your entry sparked a connection to the Reality and Language part of my memory which was in a different place until you made the connection. Thanks! I would like to point to a few interesting references.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man by Marshall McLuhan he talks about how societies with written languages tend to have streets that are gridlike where societies without written language tend to have more circular streets. Not only does language affect what we can think, things like alphabets change the structure of our thinking.

Also, think about a dictionary that defines ALL of the words. There is not a single word in the dictionary that is not defined in the dictionary. It is completely self-referential.

I think each word is a little black box of its own. We all think we know what we are talking about when we say "God" or "Open Source" but are we talking about the same thing? We don't think deeply about "God" and really invision HIM every time we utter the word. (Although maybe that's blasphemous.) Maybe we are all living in parallel universes with slightly different meaning for everything, but similar enough to think we are living in the same universe.

It seems to me that the root of much argument and conflict comes from language causing people to think that are talking when in fact they are in an apples and oranges situation.

Edward Hall's book Beyond Culture is a great book on how different cultures can be.

It sounds like this is something you've thought about quite a bit with more structure than I have... This is where I start to lose it... ;-)