Ambiguity of Language in the Real World

This one goes out to anybody who thinks the idea of language being ambiguous is a fancy-pants idea that doesn't apply to the real world. I'd like to introduce Benjamin Whorf, a linguist who claimed that the language we use for thinking affects how and what we can think. He also had a day job investigating the causes of industrial fires for an insurance company. Here he writes about how linguistic ambiguity is sometimes the cause of fires:

"My analysis was directed toward purely physical conditions, such as defective wiring, presence or lack of air spaces between metal flues and woodwork, etc., and the results were presented in these terms. ... But in due course it became evident that not only a physical situation [in terms of] physics, but the meaning of that situation to people, was sometimes a factor, through the behavior of people, in the start of a fire. And this factor of meaning was clearest when it was a LINGUISTIC MEANING, residing in the name or the linguistic description commonly applied to this situation.

Thus, around a storage of what are called 'gasoline drums,' behavior will tend to a certain type, that is, great care will be exercised; while around a storage of what are called 'empty gasoline drums,' it will tend to be different -- careless, with little repression of smoking or of tossing cigarette stubs about. Yet the 'empty' drums are perhaps the more dangerous, since they contain explosive vapor. Physically, the situation is hazardous, but the linguistic analysis according to regular analogy must employ the word 'empty,' which inevitably suggests a lack of hazard. The word 'empty' is used in two linguistic patterns: (1) as a virtual synonym for 'null and void, negative, inert,' (2) applied in analysis of physical situations without regard to, e.g., vapor, liquid vestiges, or stray rubbish, in the container."

Ignoring the multiple possibilities of 'empty' can be an explosive mistake, just as ignoring the multiple possibilities of 'honest' is Othello's undoing. It is precisely this ambiguity, these multifarious possibilities, that Syme is trying to destroy with Newspeak in 1984.