I had an unusual childhood. From age 5 to 6, I read the dictionary every night. This has had unexpected results through my life.
I learned a lot of vocabulary, but I also learned a meta-lesson. There's nowhere the dictionary "starts", no first word. Every word is defined using other words, so all of language is ultimately self-referential.
We have a technical term for this: the symbol-grounding problem. Even more useful, a related technical term: referent. The referent is the thing a reference refers to. But the thing the referent points at can change instantly. If I say "bitches", you might think I'm terribly rude – and I am – but you might feel differently to learn that's the joking way my wife and I refer to our dogs.
For most of history, it seemed natural language suffered from this imprecision alone, compared to mathematics. But Gödel's incompleteness theorems pulled math back in. Gödel basically proved that in any mathematical system, you can always construct a paradoxical statement, like "This sentence is false."
Mathematics is a form of language specialized to describe the objective, external world. So it's no surprise that around the same time, imprecision spread to physics, in the form of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It says information about position can only come at the expense of information about momentum, and vice versa. Reality has a limit on how much we can possibly know built in.
In everyday practice, these distinctions are meaningless. I have a bookcase and some plants in my office, and if I talk about the big plant or the spiky one, anyone should know what I mean.
But there's an interesting moral implication: if we can't assign absolute meaning to words, then we can't label things as good or evil.
We can't label things at all, actually. The world is what it is, and it doesn't give a dman what we call it. So many problems come from believing that words and reality are welded together.
Words are the problem.