If you're not a language nerd, you might want to skip this

...on the other hand, if you are a language nerd, you might already know all this.

I love the Greek word logos. In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. It means so much more than the English word 'word.' I've heard it translated 'reason,' or 'meaning,' or 'language,' and those are all good, but none of them really cut it alone.

Now I want to make an important distinction. When we talk about English words having more than one meaning, we usually mean multiple exclusive meanings, and we figure out which one someone means by the context of the word in the sentence. Either someone means one thing, or they mean the other, but not both.

Like the word 'plane.' Either someone means 'a flying contraption built by humans, with big noisy engines etc etc.' or they mean 'a flat geometrical surface with only two dimensions,' but they don't ever mean both at the same time.

That't not the kind of thing I'm talking about. What happens with Latin words all the time, and with Greek words sometimes, is that they include the meanings of more than one English word, and so we have to translate it different ways in different contexts to make it make sense, but it really means 'all of the above together, as a unit.' Like another of my favorite words, the French word (...but wait a minute! You didn't mention French! Yeah, okay, this pretty much happens in any language. As I was saying, like the French word) vrai. It means both true and real at the same time. I think combining those two ideas is so awesome...

Anyway, so here's a counter-example. English has one word for love, and we say I love my friends and God loves me and I love my old jeans that I've worn for years and years and I love my spouse (not me, of course, a married person), and those all use the same word. But if I translated those into Greek, each of those four phrases would use a different word for love.

So this is what I'm talking about with logos. It means word, and language, and meaning, and reason, all at once, and all as a unit, and all pointing to some idea behind all of those that wraps them up into a single, beautiful concept.