  This document chronicles this author's attempt to explore how words come to
mean what they do, with a particular focus on child language acquisition and
what that means for models of language understanding.\footnote{I say
\emph{historical} because I synthesize the ideas based on when I discovered
them and how those ideas influenced my later thinking.} I explain the setting
for child language learning, how embodiment -- being able to perceive and enact
in the world, including knowledge of concrete and abstract concepts -- is
crucial, and how emotion and cognition relate to each other and the language
learning process. I end with what I think are some of the requirements for a
language-learning agent that learns language in a setting similar to that of
children. This paper can act as a potential guide for ongoing and future work
in modeling language.
