appear to have had the clearest notions, and applied to them their terms
with the exactest choice and fitness. This way of using a man's words,
according to the propriety of the language, though it have not always
the good fortune to be understood; yet most commonly leaves the blame
of it on him who is so unskilful in the language he speaks, as not to
understand it when made use of as it ought to be.


12. Fourth Remedy: To declare the meaning in which we use them.

Fourthly, But, because common use has not so visibly annexed any
signification to words, as to make men know always certainly what they
precisely stand for: and because men, in the improvement of their
knowledge, come to have ideas different from the vulgar and ordinary
received ones, for which they must either make new words, (which men
seldom venture to do, for fear of being thought guilty of affectation or
novelty,) or else must use old ones in a new signification: therefore,
after the observation of the foregoing rules, it is sometimes necessary,
for the ascertaining the signification of words, to DECLARE THEIR
MEANING; where either common use has left it uncertain and loose, (as it
has in most names of very complex ideas;) or where the term, being very
material in the discourse, and that upon which it chiefly turns, is
liable to any doubtfulness or mistake.


13. And that in three Ways.

As the ideas men's words stand for are of different sorts, so the way of
making known the ideas they stand for, when there is occasion, is also
different. For though DEFINING be thought the proper way to make known