When I talk about meaning, I can no longer think along a single axis. This is not a school exercise with an x and a y and nothing more. Meaning is built, and deformed, along at least three main axes:

1. sign/vehicle: what we use to communicate – word, image, sound
2. context/audience: where the sign moves, who reads, watches or listens to it, and with what expectations
3. message/interpretation: what you think you are saying and what gets through

But that is not all: there is also time. The variable that sometimes changes everything, even when you thought you had arranged every part of your message down to the last comma.

From a multidimensional, multimodal perspective, that initial curve becomes a kind of living, three-dimensional cloud, constantly moving and changing shape. I call it the Gaussian Semiotic Cloud.

Inside it are all possible meanings, nuances, ambiguities, drifts and surprises. From outside it looks like chaos, beautiful to behold but hellish when you need to make sense of it. Look closely, though, and something remarkable emerges: it is not quite chaos. There are rules, a degree of causality, determinism and structured probability. It is within this cloud that meaning “precipitates” on contact with a real context. Only then does it become localised, readable and effective – or dangerous. That is why I became interested in this “shape”: if I can read it, perhaps I can also design it. And if I can design it, I can govern what happens when a sign enters circulation. Not always perfectly, not always predictably, but with greater clarity. And believe me, that makes all the difference.

Just when you think you have grasped the concept and picture meaning following a neat bell curve, a regular distribution with a peak and two orderly tails, comes the surprise: it almost never works like that.

Let us start at the beginning. An isolated word, taken out of context and considered as a pure, abstract sign disconnected from speaker, listener and where they are, is often multimodal: it has several possible peaks of meaning. Alternative readings are already built into its code.

Take “transparent”: it can mean clear, honest and legible, but also fragile, exposed or vulnerable.

And what about “native”? Digital native, biologically native, native to a territory – each opens a different world.

Then there are even more common words that are far from harmless: “shrewd” can mean alert and astute, or sly and opportunistic.

“Practical” can mean efficient and concrete, but also hasty or superficial.

“Powerful” can evoke strength and authority, or conversely domination and abuse.

And words like “big”, “fast”, “safe” or “perfect”? They seem simple, but ask “Compared with what?” and the curve explodes. “Big” compared with whom? What? Yesterday? A competitor? These are relative meanings that become semantic landmines without a precise reference. Such words carry more than one meaning on their own, and they are often exactly the ones we choose to build an identity, a message or a promise.

When you immerse the word in a concrete context – an image, a sector, an interface, a narrative voice – something happens: multimodality collapses. It does not disappear, but concentrates on one or two prevailing meanings while the others become dormant. They remain hidden, ready to emerge as soon as “something” changes. This is semantic drift: a previously peripheral meaning becomes central, or vice versa.

Within the Semantic Cloud, precipitation creates a “bubble” of meaning that is not a perfectly round, symmetrical sphere. It is more of a blob, a soft mass that deforms over time.

Some areas thin out, others expand. There are craters, ridges and layers. Then there are black holes: historical events, viral words, emotional shocks. True semantic attractors that bend space and cause meaning to migrate.

Let us look at some examples.

Words such as “propaganda”, once neutral or even positive – think of the “Sacra Congregazione de Propaganda Fide” – now carry a negative, manipulative aura.

Or “ideology”: once a sign of a structured worldview, now often synonymous with rigidity or fanaticism.

Or “viral”: first associated with disease, then a symbol of social media success, and ambiguous again after Covid.

Or “sustainable”: once noble, now often suspect through advertising overuse.

Semantic drift does not arise only from time. Sometimes a change of place, culture or sector is enough. “Powerful” is a compliment in a gym; in a romantic relationship it can sound threatening. “Light” is a plus in fashion, a problem in a strategic plan. Drift and precipitation depend not only on what you say but where and to whom. In the blob I call the Semantic Cloud, every change leaves a ripple. Some disappear; others remain and change everything. These shifts are often unpredictable: anomalies in historical development, extraordinary events, sudden explosions of trends. At other times they lie waiting, like hidden semantic traps ready to spring when you step on them. Loaded, dormant words seem harmless until the context reactivates them. When that happens, there is no escape: meaning has already migrated elsewhere.

Minimal but useful shapes and formulas

• Simple case (one peak): multivariate normal distribution → visually: ellipsoidal isosurfaces
• Real-world case (multiple peaks): a mixture of Gaussians → our dynamic blob
• In practice, think not in absolute definitions but in P(reading | context, time) – conditional probability.

Rather than defining a word, the task is to govern its field of possible interpretations according to where, how and when it will be read. Not a bell, but a blob. Not fixed, but deformable. And if you can see the shape, you can decide where to direct the precipitation.