How Many Ways Can You Think of the Same Word in Different Contexts?

Douglas Hofstater's theory is that we have a word, it has a meaning. We then find a new analogous situation that's close enough to the previous situation and we reapply the word. And now that word has a new meaning. And eventually you can end up with a completely different definition than the original meaning. He believes that there's this connection between language and what he calls analogy. But I feel like that's misleading because what we're really talking about is abstraction.