What Do You Mean?

 

Words in English can have many meanings, and can be different Parts of Speech (POS).

He turned on the light.
The car turned on a dime.

He turned the light on - “on” can be an adverb or preposition (the way it is used dictates which it is).

“bar” can be a noun, a verb, a preposition.

As a noun, it can be:

An iron bar
a bar of chocolate
A wine bar
The counter over which alcoholic drinks are sold
A milk bar - where milk replaces alcohol
A measure of atmospheric pressure
A short fragment of music (hum a few bars)
An abstract form of a physical bar – a bar on forever chemicals
The bar of a high jump frame – raising the bar makes it harder to jump overr
Lawyers collectively - the Bar

Some other examples:

A chess set
A movie set
A movie set in Hawaii
(the Unconscious Mind puts back all the elided words – a movie that is set in Hawaii)

About 12% of English words have a single part of speech and a single meaning.

English has tens of thousands of figurative phrases – where the meaning is not deducible from the component words:

A piece of cake (something easy to do)
Accessory after the fact
All hands on deck
As far as one knows
Ask around
At the drop of a hat
Batten down the hatches
Beat around the bush
Bite the bullet
Blow the whistle
Bring to the table
Home and hosed
Jump the shark
Keep up with the Joneses

Sometimes figurative speech is not what it seems:

TSMC has raised the bar on semiconductor track density with their far ultraviolet.
Fred will raise the bar on forever chemicals in the drinking water at the next council meeting, saying the benefits don’t justify the costs.

Why?

Why did anyone think that LLMs could be used to handle anything complex?