Language as Displacement Field: Meaning, Miscommunication, and the Ground State of Shared Understanding

We apply the displacement framework to language, treating meaning as a ground state () in a shared semantic space. Words are displacement operators --- they move a listener from their current cognitive state toward a target state. Successful communication minimizes the path cost of the journey. Miscommunication is path divergence: two trajectories beginning at the same word and arriving at different states.

Metaphor is identified as a simulation technology --- a tool for communicating displacement below the cognitive Planck scale, where direct semantic operators fail. We propose that all language is fundamentally displacement management: the ongoing project of reducing $$ between two minds across an irreversible channel. We analyze the implications for compression, poetry, and the design of language systems.