The complete meaning of a word is always contextual, and no study of meaning apart from context can be taken seriously. - John Rupert Firth

Speech is our most valuable instrument, because we can make it fit our common lives. We are not born to follow words. Words follow life. It has always been so from the very beginning. In fact, the human larynx and the shape of the passages above it have evolved in harmony with the lives our earliest ancestors lived, first in the trees, and then on the ground.

The phonetic animal par excellence is man. All men are born with an infinite capacity for making noises and using them.

Meaning... is to be regarded as a complex of contextual relations, and phonetics, grammar, lexicography, and semantics each handles its own components of the complex in its appropriate context.