> But it is exactly historical reality, the extended family of linguistically
> similar words, that provides the unconscious impact--the
> connotations--that are essential to the real meanings of words.
I don't follow this. The "real meaning of words" is the way they are used by speakers of a language in a given time and place. How could the use of a language at some point in the past have some "unconscious impact" upon people? Their unconscious magically knows how a term was used in the past?
--If people are unaware of the historical use of a term, the actual "meaning" of the word for that group of people is the current use.
Miles