Un guijarro no es un canto rodado

Abstract

The sense or meaning of a word resides in thought and only manifests itself when the word is used. Yet the sense conveyed can be equivocal if the word is taken out of its context, spatial as well as temporal. Considering the present time then, we are dealing with the determination of a space, with exploring around the contextual area. The study that resulted in this paper involves geography, but is no geographical research; at most research on human geography. Although it involves speech, its direct object is not language. Neither it is, in strictness, ethnography nor cultural anthropology. But it concerns all of these fields and, therefore, cannot stay away from any of them. Only one concept, perhaps, overrides the whole undertaking and meets the double condition of being simple and complex at the same time: the concept of elementary area. This concept rests upon the seminal idea of taking the sense and meaning of something (in this case, a name or a noun) as the use given to such something (such name or noun) in a particular space: a here and a now. One word or signifier, one single meaning; that is all there is. Yet it is this extreme simplification that which allows freedom of speculation, clear and refined.