Imagine you’re back in high school and your friend is coming over to hang out. Your mom tells you, “Make sure he’s comfortable,” and you agree (You were going to do this anyways. Who doesn’t make sure her friends are comfortable?). When he arrives, you ask if he wants any drinks and snacks, and he says that he’s “all good.” You two spend an hour or two finishing your homework, then watch TV until he has to go home for dinner. In many ways, a perfect way to spend an afternoon; but, after he leaves, your mom is furious. “Why didn’t you bring him anything? I thought you said you would make him comfortable! You’re always so rude to our guests!” You, of course, are confused. You asked your friend if he wanted anything and he said no—isn’t that making sure he’s comfortable?
Some kind of misunderstanding clearly took place here. Your mom thought that she asked you to bring your friend refreshments, while you thought she only wanted you to make sure he had everything he needed. This misunderstanding might be characterized as a normative disagreement. Your mom thinks that good etiquette entails anticipating your guest’s needs, while you think it’s up to your friend to tell you if he needs anything. In other words, we can chalk this disagreement up to a clash between ask and guess culture. However, this doesn’t seem quite right. After all, you didn’t just sit around waiting for your friend to ask for a glass of water or a piece of bread—you asked him if he wanted anything, and he declined. Maybe you were less insistent than your mom wanted, but you’re still firmly a guess-culturer and not an ask-culturer.
A better explanation for what happened is the presence of homonymy—the phenomenon where two or more words have the same form but different meanings—which causes intractable and mysterious disagreements. The homonym that caused the post-hangout-blowup is the word “comfortable”, which can take a positive sense or a negative sense. In its positive sense, “comfortable” indicates the presence of physical ease and relaxation. This is the sense that your mom intended when she told you to make your friend comfortable—she wanted you to actively do stuff that would make him feel good. In its negative sense, “comfortable” indicates the absence of discomfort. This is why when your friend said he didn’t need anything, you thought that he was already comfortable.
Homonymy causes a particularly thorny kind of argument that can be described as two ships passing in the night. The core of these arguments is two people talking about different things while thinking that they’re talking about the same thing. Unless they realize and resolve this somehow, they will be stuck arguing forever, each wondering how the other just can’t understand what they’re arguing about.
Only a particular type of homonymy, systematic homonymy, causes this sort of confusion. Discrete homonymy, where the meanings are completely distinct and non-overlapping, is too obvious to cause any problems. It’s hard to imagine an intractable argument arising over “banking” wherein one person thinks they are talking about making deposits and the other thinks they are talking about making a turn. This kind of confusion won’t arise when the meanings are merely similar, either. When we talk about “paper”, we typically know if we are referencing the material or an essay. Systematic homonymy is special because the different meanings are intimately connected to a core concept, which makes it feel like the meanings themselves are the same. “Comfort” is core to the positive and negative senses of “comfortable”, so your agreement with your mom that “comfort” means physical ease distracts from your disagreement on what it takes to make a person “comfortable”.
The hangout case is quite ordinary and trivial, but homonymy is at the root of many serious ideological debates, too. In the Politics, Aristotle writes that the defining principle behind both oligarchy and democracy is justice, or just the idea that people should get what they deserve. In the case of equals, equality is just, and in the case of unequals, inequality is just. Disagreement arises because, “For the ones, if they are unequal in a certain thing, such as goods, suppose they are unequal generally, while the others suppose that if they are equal in a certain thing, such as freedom, they are equal generally” (Poetics, 3.9, 1280a23-25). A similar relationship is at the center of contemporary politics. Conservatives tend to believe that people deserve whatever happens to them because our actions play a large part in determining what happens to us, while liberals tend to believe that people don’t deserve whatever happens to them because luck and other factors outside our control play a large part in determining what happens to us. Partisans in all of these cases believe that the justice they care about is simple justice, and that people who disagree with them don’t care about justice at all.
Besides disagreement, a more dangerous consequence of homonymy is transference, when properties of one meaning of a homonym are transferred to another. This can result in people receiving praise or blame for actions they are associated with, but for which they bear no real responsibility. When I worked at Starbucks before college, a coworker asked me if I invested in Bitcoin and I said yes because I owned like $50 worth of Bitcoin through Robinhood. From that point on, they treated me as if I was secretly rich because their idea of a Bitcoin investor was what they were seeing in the news. They attributed the characteristics of an early Bitcoin investor—traits that didn’t actually describe me—to a broader category of Bitcoin investor, one that I did fall into.
You will see this happening all the time now that you’re aware of it. I recently had the thought that this might explain why I’ve seen so many pro-Palestine protests at film premiers (like for the new Captain America and Snow White movies) and very few at Donald Trump’s rallies and press conferences. Unifying these protests is anti-Zionism and the people that they’re protesting, whether it’s Shira Haas, Gal Gadot, or Trump, would probably call themselves zionist. What’s incongruous is that these actresses, who are not genocidal compared to Trump, have received a disproportionate amount of protestor attention. While Haas and Gadot are Israeli, their support for the country has been limited to expressing sympathy for hostages and rebuking anti-semitism, and they served their conscriptions in non-combat roles. On the other hand, Trump sent Israel un-targeted heavy bombs (prohibited under past administrations) that can only be used for mass bombing and is developing a plan to ship one million Palestinians to Libya, which would entail a second Nakba worse than the displacement following 1948.
The gulf between the Zionism of Hass/Gadot and the Zionism of Trump underscores a homonymy that plagues the debate over Israel and Palestine. The definition of Zionism on Wikipedia is that
Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement […] aimed to establish and maintain a national home for the Jewish people, pursued through the colonization of Palestine […]. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible (emphasis mine).
The expansionism described here is almost inherently genocidal and it certainly entails annexation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. On the other hand, the ADL says that
Zionism is the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel.
Before 1948, this would’ve entailed displacement, but in 2025, Zionism under this definition doesn’t automatically imply supporting an invasion of the Gaza Strip or the West Bank. I think that most supporters of Israel assume the ADL definition of Zionism when they call themselves Zionists while most supporters of Palestine assume the Wikipedia definition of Zionism when they call themselves anti-Zionists. This is reflected in the fact that many people on both sides support a two-state solution, which would be impossible under the opposing meanings. Conflating these definitions makes an already difficult disagreement into an intractable one. It causes pro-peace Jews to attack anti-Zionists whom they largely agree with, and it makes protesting actresses feel just as important as protesting a man who has promised to “clear out” the Gaza Strip.
Of course, recognizing homonymy won’t resolve disagreements by itself. You and your mom still need to sort out if it’s better to make guests comfortable in the positive sense or if its better to simply ensure they aren’t uncomfortable. Ideological disagreements often run much deeper than the surface homonymy. Even after recognizing that a political opponent is in normative agreement that justice matters, partisans will still seek to demonstrate that their conception is more correct than its alternatives. Many anti-zionists believe that even the ADL definition of Zionism is unacceptable and that Israelis ought to be displaced to indemnify the displacement of Palestinians. However, we can only reach these deeper levels of discussion if we first move past the surface-level disagreements induced by homonymy, and for that reason we must always be on the lookout. ■
