comment: >
  
  I don’t understand your example. I think it’s reasonable to say a chair generally has some support to the ground and is also designed to allow a person to sit on it. Do you have another example of an intentionally definitionless term ?
context: An interesting fact about categories is that the way that the human brain works is not by matching definitions but rather by archetypes. 
  A lot of people think we put things in categories by comparing an item to a list of properties and then if and only if the item has the properties on the list does it go in the category. That’s not how brains or languages work. 
  Is a hotdog a sandwich?
  The reason people have inane category fight like this is that they keep making that definition basis error. I.e. “a sandwich has bread outside and a meat filling…”
  Instead, this is how categorization works:
  In your mind instead of a list of criteria, there exists a prototype sandwich. Close your eyes and say the word sandwich. If you’re like me, you’re now picturing that prototype sandwich. Mine looks like this 🥪. 
  It has two slices of white bread some lettuce and definitely some meat and cheese. That’s the center of the bullseye. The archetype. And it lights up a particular cluster of neurons that we can “recognition of a sandwich”. 
  Now when you open your eyes and see something that might be a sandwich, what you’re doing is comparing the new object to the archetype. If I see one without lettuce and on a club roll, my mind says “close enough” to the archetype and I call it a sandwich. Personally, when I see a taco, it’s too far from the bullseye to hit the recognition circuit cluster of neurons for “sandwich” so I don’t use that word. But if everyone else started to, probably my dart board would grow. It’s not like there’s some kind of objective meaning for the category. 
  Now, the exact same is true of social categories like gender. The word “woman” refers to the archetype you see when you close your eyes. That archetype is based on a platonic ideal of a woman. In my minds eye she looks like this 🙋‍♀️💃. In real life, when someone has long hair but isn’t wearing a dress, yeah, she land a hair off center from the bullseye — but is just as much a “woman” as a club roll with meat and cheese is a sandwich. Other things can vary too. Maybe she is wearing a dress but doesn’t have long hair. Maybe she has un expressed Y chromosomes. Maybe she’s physiologically male but expresses gender as a woman. 
  All of these things are somewhere on my dartboard for woman. 
  All social categorizations work this way. Things that fit a right definition based category rather than an archetype are the rare exception and gender has never been one of them. >
  
  I’m not op but with your logic, wouldn’t a lot of the self ID stuff become problematic ? You are basically saying that trans women need to pass as women before they can be considered as women. Because otherwise they don’t fit the archetype. If my brain goes “short hair and beard = male” but the person identifies as a women, what then? I think that’s what Op is referring to. There are no traits that map onto these terms anymore >
  
  Let’s flesh out this discussion with more precise words. We’ll need:
  
  gender identity
  gender expression
  
  
  I’m not op but with your logic, wouldn’t a lot of the self ID stuff become problematic ? You are basically saying that trans women need to pass as women before they can be considered as women. 
  
  Trans women need to express their gender identity as female to be taken as female. What constitutes a woman will depend on who’s dartboard you’re talking about. If it’s their own, we’re talking about their gender identity. 
  Who’s are you asking about?
  
  Because otherwise they don’t fit the archetype. 
  
  Who’s archetype?
  
  If my brain goes “short hair and beard = male” but the person identifies as a women, what then? 
  
  Then you have a choice to make. Update your dartboard like I did with the taco or don’t. 
  
  I think that’s what Op is referring to. There are no traits that map onto these terms anymore
  
  How do you get to there from here? You went from “here are a new set of traits to map” to “there are no traits”. I think you’re still thinking with definitions instead of archetypes. >
  
  It never did OP. Gender is a social construct >
  
  You are equating something not being able to be objectively and concretely defined with something having no meaning, which is a false equivalence.
  When it comes down to it, most words can't be concretely defined in such a way that we can come up with a set of criteria that all things that we use the word for fit, and all things that we do not use the word for do not. The classic example that people use for this is the word "chair".
  A word can carry a lot of meaning without having a concrete definition like this. We can even accept that a word's meaning is subjective and that it's unlikely that any two people will define it in exactly the same way (take colours, as an example of that) while also accepting that the word has both meaning and utility.
  Definitions are a tool. They do not make language work, they do their best to describe how it works.