There once was a man who owned an apple orchard (which he loved very much). Every morning he would walk through the orchard, pluck the apples that were ready, and place them in a red bucket (which matched his apples nicely). After filling the bucket, he would carry the apples to his barn and dump them in a bin to sell. Then he would set the red pail on a three-legged stool by his workbench and return to the house.

In the evening, the man’s young son would ramble out to the barn, pull the empty red bucket from the three-legged stool, fill it with water from the outdoor pump, and slosh it all the way back to his mother in the kitchen so she could boil it for cooking. When the bucket was drained, the young son would return it to the barn and heave it up onto the three-legged stool where it remained until the next morning.

One bucket. Two very different types of content (apples and water).

Words are a lot like that. They are empty and versatile until someone invests them with meaning.

This is E.D. Hirsch’s point in Validity in Interpretation:

…[M]eaning is an affair of consciousness not of words. Almost any word sequence can, under the conventions of language, legitimately represent more than one complex of meaning. A word sequence means nothing in particular until somebody either means something by it or understands something from it. There is no magic land of meanings outside human consciousness. Whenever meaning is connected to words, a person is making the connection, and the particular meanings he lends to them are never the only legitimate ones under the norms and conventions of his language. (pg. 4)