>>Also grammar has a lot to do with what a word mean. American English is perhaps the most complex language around. The syntax of the sentence seems to change with each new generation of people. And alters what is understood.
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>And since the meaning of the word relies heavily on context, and the short forms (button caption, SMS message, sign, news headline and such) use very few words, the whole text may be contain only ambiguous words. I've compiled a list (with some help from UT) of ambiguous expressions at http://ndragan.com/lange/dvosmisleno.html for general amusement.
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>>We adopt words from other language almost daily. Also create new ones too. We change the meanings often also. ("like, cool, man") Once they become popular, they declare them as an English word and place them in the dictionary.
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>Worse - even the most common words gain new meanings regularly. Just look at your computer and the language of electronics - there are numerous pulses (it's alive!), ramps (drive carefully), gates (knock first), buses (but no trams), keys and locks (but none of the former opens any of the latter), fans (you know the Chinese ladies' accessory), drivers (without vehicles), casings (without gunpowder), flip-flops (never say which size foot), monitors (but no frigates), bridges (no rivers), jacks (with no cars to lift), mice (no cats), cards (but nobody's playing), stacks (no hay), forks (no spoon), chips (no potatos), arrows (no bows), escape sequences (no jailbreak plan), pirates (no ships), windows (no glass - who would want that, I wonder), disks (no Greeks to cast them), washers (but no dirty laundry), and finally anything with more than three pieces connected is some grid.

Don't forget that most of these terms where coined by kids and teenages.

You forgot to mention Word (two Bytes), Byte (not to be confussed with Bite), Nibble (half a byte), and Bit (a small bit of a nibble). Who eats this stuff anyway?

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>>It mystifies me that English seem to be the most popular language on the internet. Yet, it is the least understood. This probably explains why scientific papers where not written in English until more recently (so I heard).
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>Latin was the language of science until French and German took over - not exactly sure when, but I figure it was about the time of industrial revolution.
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>BTW, why did Samuel Beckett write in French?

I never read any of his work.