Words are abstractions, or simplifi cations of what they stand for. Words stand for
ideas and things, but they are not the same as those ideas and things. People who
study meaning say “the word is not the thing.” Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa (1978)
introduced the “ladder of abstraction,” which illustrates that words fall somewhere
on a continuum from concrete to abstract. Figure 3.1 shows an example of a ladder
of abstraction for a dog named Tina. The words used to describe her become increasingly
concrete as you go up the ladder.