Key concepts and the half life of language

This is somewhat of a grammar nerd post that is less about the material and more about the development of our knowledge that comes out of that material, in terms of key concepts. A way to approach a literature course is by comparing one's initial understanding of a key concept with one’s understanding at its close. It’s important to define these concepts in our arguments as an exercise because a word can mean to me something different from what it means to you. I’ve started thinking about lexicography (the craft of compiling a dictionary) more critically, and my own reliance of meanings of words given by the Oxford or Merriam Webster. A recent occurrence showed me that any word, particularly any definition of an -ism (such as sexism, racism, classism) can be understood vastly different by those who construct its meaning by some generalized value.. which even if informed by the meaning given by the dictionary, doesn’t carry meaningful depth. The meaning people give to a word appears to me as conversationally-embedded paratext now.

What spurred this was this Ghost Word video, about the instance of error occurring in one word's transcription of meaning, and the considerable time it took to recognize it as an error. The meaning of a word has no stasis, and can become unreliable over time. Since a team of people formulates the meaning of a word and decides that it is appropriate, why not contest its meaning? 

Which leads me to the half-life of language. There’s an episode of 99% Invisible, a podcast about design, about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’s 10,000 year plan for safely allocating nuclear waste. The episode considers the degrading signified behind the signifiers within language -- and that even if a conceivable plan were to develop and hold after 10,000 years, ... how can the knowledge that it is supposed to support be transcribed into a language that is understandable to someone in 10,000 years? That is, under the circumstance that most people who have the ability of transcribing it had been exterminated by nuclear destruction? One of their arguments is that the original Beowulf written only a thousand years ago is barely comprehensible today. So that's something to think about regarding taking care with how we construct and define our language to fortify our arguments and help others either correct our understanding or maybe shed light on their own.