A theory that meaning *accretes* around words in a process not that different from how logjams form in a river.
The metaphor is due to Andy Clark in his 1997 Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again 
. He uses mangrove islands. Same idea, but I like the logjam image more.
Here's podcast text :
> 3. Definitions include debris. We tend to think of concepts like “stool” or “tree” or even “concept” itself as being labelled by words. Barrett, following Andy Clark, suggests that words come first. It’s not absurd to think that what learning is, is attaching (lossily-compressed) experiences to preexisting words. > Consider this everyday scene: A child is walking with his mother. “Look at the doggie!” she says, pointing. The child reacts with some sort of interest and gets a rewarding smile. After several similar episodes, spread out over time, the child starts pointing and saying “doggie!” himself. Each time he’s rewarded with the pleasure of his mother. Once in a while, he gets it wrong, illustrating that counterexamples are important too. He might point at my daughter’s mostly-Chihuahua rescue dog and say, “rat!” His mother will correct him kindly and say, “No, dear, that’s a *little* doggie”. Over time, the child will be able to reliably identify dogs, and we can say he’s learned the concept of “dog”. > I say “concepts include debris” because concept formation is not exceptionally scrupulous about *what* compressed experience it attaches to words. Like a logjam in a river catching logs, twigs, empty beer cans, and fishing line, a concept will have associations that don’t make a lot of sense.