A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

There is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were.

"There is no such thing as an isolated proposition. For what I call a "proposition" is a position in the game of language."

Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words. You say: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.