Ambiguity
This brings us to the efficiency of language. Without our knowledge (but because of psychological reasons) we humans have evolved a very efficient form of language. We don't have different words or sentences for absolutely everything we want to refer to. We re-use some of them. This is known as ambiguity!
What does "bank" mean for example? The money shop or the side of a river? Is that all? How about an alternative to "rely"? Not to mention the activity of doing transactions with cash or cheques. Or again, as happened to me last week, if I were to announce that ICT and BCC had forged a partnership in say networking, I wonder how many of you (like the person who proof read my article) would get a sour taste in their mouths? "Forge" in this context refers to the "hammering out" process, whereas to my colleague and maybe to you, as you listened, it had underpinnings of an illegal representation! There are many other forms of ambiguity apart from this (lexical or word sense) type. "I saw the man with the telescope", "I detest visiting relatives", "Time flies like arrows" are all ambiguous sentences, but we shall not worry about these here.
The point about ambiguity is that we rarely have trouble with it! Which bank you mean will be disambiguated often by the context in which you use it. If a lawyer were to say "I had to rush to the bar… to have a drink" it would only be to pull your leg of course. So, the context usually makes what would usually be an ambiguous word, very plain and clear. The benefit is that you don't have to know nearly as many words as concepts you understand. This is the efficiency of language.
There's magic in that too. Just any two words would not be suitable candidates to share a single lexical form. They must be sufficiently distant not to occur in the same context - since context is the tool we use to tell them apart in the first place!
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