OK, when I first started reading this thread I thought it was a discussion on Linguistics and philosophy of language. But as usual it has been reduced to the usual internet dribble about, religion, politics and global warming. So im going to get back to the thread theme and ignore all the posts before.

Language can be broken down to many forms but the most interesting is Pragmatics. Pragmatics deal with the intention of the sentence/phrase.

Like previously mentioned sentence:

"People who live in glass houses..."

First of all there is the literal translation. What is more interesting is the metaphorical tranlation. From pragmatics point of view we can brake a phrase into three parts, the intent of the speaker, the actual phrase said and the intent recieved by the listener. If a speaker utters the sentence previously mentioned he/she will be implying the meaning that you should not expose your weakness. When the sentence is uttered it doesn't have that meaning anymore, just the direct meaning. Then when the listener hears it it takes meaning again. But by no means does that meaning is quivalent to the meaning intended by the speaker. Rather the meaning is approximated by the listner as to his/her expectation of the intent of the speaker.

To make it clearer imagine someone tells you: "Can you bring me that book over there". There is no real way for the listener to know for sure that the book he/she is thinking the speaker is refering to is the same as he/she is thinking that the utterence refered to. While the meaning of the sentance on its own has no reference at all as you must be in the locale of the speaker to make a reference.

So as an Enlish speaker and can both generate and understand an infinite number of utterenses. But it is impossible for me to ever be certain of the intended meaning of an utterance.

Sorry for no references, blogging from work and dont have my Pholosophy of Language text handy. But Russel, Frege and Gryce are good starts for these questions