NBA Powerless Rankings: 5 lessons we didn’t learn in the regular season

4. Awards are nebulous

You know what I like most about the Most Valuable Player award? There are no guidelines to it. “Valuable” means different things to different people, and people choose their awards based on their own criteria.

This is good. This is real. One could argue that each word means something different to each person. We don’t learn language by rifling through a dictionary, finding words that are explained by other words to make meaning, and then sliding that word via dictionary definition into our vocabulary like a brick in a house.

We learn language by experiencing it around us. The way I first encountered a word is unique to me. How I learned what ‘verisimilitude’ meant was not the way anyone else has. Like a butterfly effect of semantics, every occurance of that word in my life since has shifted or changed my understanding of it slightly. Broadly, this is how language changes. Usage drives definition, not the other way around.

The realest way we bring words into our understanding is through semantic prototype. You can exhaustively define any word and still never fully reach universal understanding. Take a cat for instance. What we think of a cat is a four legged animal, with a tail, with fur, a round face, and won’t leave me alone when I’m eating chicken. Most people agree on this.

If that cat loses a leg due to some horrible accident with a super-powered laser pointer, is it still a cat? The definition tells us that no, cats have four legs. That definition isn’t good enough, then. Do we then change the definition for that potentiality, or do we agree to some unspoken truce that a cat is this… thing. The thing that is a cat.

A “valuable player” is even more open to interpretation than ‘cat.’ Good luck hammering that down into something everyone agrees on.

Or don’t and take it for what it is: a somewhat indefinite attempt to award a single player for something we’re all not quite sure of.