Polyversity is the kind of idea which everyone recognizes as common sense when it’s presented explicitly, yet which often fails to function implicitly when attention is turned elsewhere. But that’s because we can’t attend to the sign and its object at the same time: the sign is the medium through which we cognize or recognize the object. You can’t carry a ladder while you climb it, or think about signs while you read them.
One consequence of polyversity is that, as the ancient sage put it, ‘the name that can be named is not the eternal name’ (Tao Te Ching 1). Differences arise between presence and representation.
The pit of a peach or cherry has nothing to do with the kind of pit you can dig with a shovel. We can say then that these are two different words with respect to denotation, although they are the same with respect to both spoken and written form. Thus we can pit one kind of difference against another. Likewise, something moving fast is in rapid motion, but something stuck fast is not moving at all. To quicken something is to bring it to life, and thus make it ‘quicker,’ but to fasten something is to immobilize it, not to make it ‘faster’. And then there’s the verb fast, which has yet another meaning, involving neither movement nor the lack of it.
Since the number of one-syllable sounds distinguishable in English (or any language) is finite, it is predictable that as the language develops, one sound will accidentally get attached to two or more different concepts. Then we have two words that happen to sound exactly the same: homonyms, as they are called in linguistics. Homonymy is different from polysemy, in which one word can have many ‘senses’ or ‘meanings’; yet ‘there is an extensive grey area between the concepts’ (McArthur 1992, 795).