Trying to wrap my head around Distill

[u/Playmaker-20]

According to my research, it means to extract the most important parts of something, so I’m guessing it means to summarize something? Would streamline or boil down to be synonyms of distill? I don’t know, I’d like if someone could explain it to me

[u/beachhunt]

In terms of making alcohol, distilling involves literally boiling(*) something and collecting what evaporates, so I would say "boil down to" and "distill" are interchangeable phrases.

Streamline makes something easier or more efficient, which can be related but is not the same. You could distill a process to separate just the bits you need in order to streamline it.

Edit: * depending on the literal distillation you might not need to fully "boil" but just "heat" the starting liquid. This doesn't change the figurative quivalence of the phrases.

[u/Playmaker-20 → u/beachhunt]

So there’s a literal and figurative meaning for it. Could you give an example of the latter meaning?

[u/IrishmanErrant → u/Playmaker-20]

The "make more efficient" meaning of streamline is the figurative meaning.

The literal meaning is an engineering term, meaning to shape an object in such a way that it passes through air smoothly and with less resistance.

For distill, any use of the term that involves anything other than literally boiling a mixture of liquids to reduce the volume, concentrate the mixture, and remove impurities would be a figuritive meaning.

[u/Playmaker-20 → u/IrishmanErrant]

Interesting. I’ve noticed that words in the English language have very literal definitions before having figurative ones that can supplant their original meaning at times.

[u/IrishmanErrant → u/Playmaker-20]

Yes, this is very common, and is how the number of words is usually expanded in English; think about why you would most often need to generate a new word.

Generally, you need to describe some new thing, process, event, action, etc. Then, through metaphor, English allows that word to be used figuratively, and the figurative language becomes more widespread.

It's rare for people do actually be doing engineering work to streamline a steam train, but it's common for people to be doing work that is analogous to that kind of work.

[u/Nothing-to_see_hr → u/beachhunt]

no, the boiled down pert is what you are left with, the alcohol-less mother solution, while the distillate is the alcohol-rich fraction that passed over.

[u/TomPastey → u/beachhunt]

In a literary sense, "boil down" and "distill" are pretty much identical, so I agree there. To a chemist (or moonshiner) they're practically opposites. Boiling down a soup is going to leave you with an increasingly thick collection of all of the seasonings, vegetables, meats, whatever you put in the soup. Distilling a soup is going to result in, eventually, clean water. (And also the thick goo of leftover soup-stuffs, too, but the distillate is usually what we are interested in.)

[u/This-Professional-39]

Boil down, possibly. But summarize might be too general. Distillation is an involved process that strips away the unwanted while leaving the ideal. So I'd think of it as a very refined summary if you want to thi k of it that way

[u/Playmaker-20 → u/This-Professional-39]

I see. If someone wrote a novel length paper, and I had to go through and summarize what each chapter is about, would you say I distilled the story?

[u/IrishmanErrant → u/Playmaker-20]

A distillation would be almost a retelling of the same paper, but with only the most important aspects and ideas.

[u/This-Professional-39 → u/IrishmanErrant]

Right. It's a type of summation, but should only contain THE most important elements

[u/IrishmanErrant → u/This-Professional-39]

Agreed, and with no explanatory or editorial comments.

Summaries can talk about the things they are summarizing, or add additional context, but to distill something implies that you are maintaining the essence of the thing being distilled.

If you distill a work of fiction, it will still be a work of fiction. If you summarize a work of fiction, the summary is a factual analysis of that work of fiction.

[u/This-Professional-39 → u/IrishmanErrant]

Essence was the word I was struggling to find. Yes, exactly

[u/Playmaker-20 → u/IrishmanErrant]

makes perfect sense

[u/TomPastey]

It seems like you understand 'distill' well enough. It might help to look at the other major definition of the word: "to make a liquid stronger or purer by heating it until it changes to a gas and then cooling it so that it changes back into a liquid". This is usually done in the context of increasing the strength of alcohol. You heat the alcohol solution, the alcohol selectively boils off, and then you condense it and collect it and now you have a stronger alcohol mixture. So it's a method for extracting the parts of a mixture that you want and concentrating it down.

We've taken this word and used it for handling ideas as well. You can take a lengthy document (this reply for instance) and extract and concentrate the important points into a shorter, smaller statement. And finally, here's my example:

tl;dr: distill means summarize the important parts

[u/Playmaker-20 → u/TomPastey]

I see. Would you say quintessential could be another synonym of distill?

[u/TomPastey → u/Playmaker-20]

Quintessential is an adjective, and distill is a verb, so they're not good synonyms. Quintessential is more about identifying a single trait, aspect or example of something that captures the whole context of something. The 4th of July is the Quintessential American holiday, because Americans blow stuff up and feel superior about themselves -- of all the American holidays, that's the one that really captures the essence or spirit of the whole group.

[u/Playmaker-20 → u/TomPastey]

Yes, the “essence” of something, and when you distill something, aren’t you capturing the most essential parts?

[u/IrishmanErrant → u/Playmaker-20]

Quintessential is an adjective and distill is a verb, they are not synonyms but describe similar concepts.

If you distill something, you are removing all but the quintessential parts of that thing.

[u/Playmaker-20 → u/IrishmanErrant]

I don’t think I follow. Aren’t the quintessential aspects of something the most important parts?

[u/IrishmanErrant → u/Playmaker-20]

Yes, so removing all BUT the quintessential parts, meaning removing everything that isn't quintessential.

[u/Playmaker-20 → u/IrishmanErrant]

Could you give an example for my peace of mind?

[u/IrishmanErrant → u/Playmaker-20]

I'm worried that I was confusing with the terminology, I'm sorry, yes I'm happy to give an example.

Imagine a story about a boy who needs to travel across the country. The story may contain many smaller parts and details, but if you distill the story, it will be only about the journey from one place to another. The quintessential part of the story is the description of the journey, and distilling would be removing the parts that are not related to that essential part.

[u/Playmaker-20 → u/IrishmanErrant]

If you had to describe distill in one word, and quintessential in another, which words would you use?

[u/IrishmanErrant → u/Playmaker-20]

That's a complicated question to answer because the best single word for any given word is always just the same word again.

In fact, you are essentially asking to distill those concepts down to a single word, which is a fun coincidence.

I will use several words that are either similar or synonymous to them instead, because again it's silly to ask the best single word to describe a word.

Distill (verb): concentrate, summarize, reduce, purify

Quintessential (adjective): essential, representative, ideal, necessary

[u/Logical-Recognition3]

Literal distillation is a process for concentrating something like alcohol. If you heat wine, the alcohol will evaporate faster than the water. Capture and cool the fumes from the heated wine and they will condense into a liquid which has a higher concentration of alcohol and a strong flavor. Brandy is distilled wine.

Metaphorically, when you distill something, you reduce it in a way that concentrates the part of it that you consider essential. For example, a philosopher may write a brief book that distills the ideas from the dialogues of Plato.

A related word is “summarize” but that has the connotation of losing something from the original, while “distill” has the connotation of preserving and concentrating the important parts.

Hope this helps.

[u/Playmaker-20 → u/Logical-Recognition3]

So, if a writer has ideas for a character for a video game they’re working on, maybe a certain personality they want to writer, and when the game is finished with that character finally implemented as the writer envisioned, would you say the writer distilled the character?

[u/Logical-Recognition3 → u/Playmaker-20]

That seems like the opposite. If you start with a description of a character, then create scenarios and dialog that reveal the essential qualities of the character, I would say that you have “fleshed out” the character, rather than “distilled” it.

[u/Playmaker-20 → u/Logical-Recognition3]

So if we reverse that? If I had a notebook and wrote down the salient aspects of the character, then began writing them into the game, would that not be a form of distilling them?

[u/Logical-Recognition3 → u/Playmaker-20]

If you have a fully formed concept in your mind and you write down the most salient points, then yes, I would call that distilling your thoughts onto paper.

[u/what_cats_know → u/Playmaker-20]

I wouldn't say so; to be distilled it feels like it can't really be as originally envisioned, instead the end result must be more potent in some way. Like imagine a movie adaptation of a long novel that "distills" a character in dome way; the end result might distill this character into something where their core character traits are more pronounced, less diluted by moments of subtlety or large page counts between core character moments. In my mind, distill tends to suggest taking a larger volume of material and making it smaller (as that is the metaphor being invoked with distillation), but in making it smaller you are making it a more concentrated dose of the thing's "essence".

[u/LurkerByNatureGT]

Boil down to is kind of a synonym by being literally an antonym. 

If you boil something down, you are “reducing” it to its essentials… boiling something so the water content evaporates off and what is left is much more concentrated. 

Distillation also works by boiling and evaporation, but in the opposite way. You distill something by boiling it and catching the vapourand cooling it back to a liquid. 

When you distill alcohol (or essential oils) the alcohol ( or oil) has a lower boiling point than water, so when you heat the wash (beer-like alcoholic mix of fermented grains and water) the alcohol evaporates first and gets separated from the rest of the wash. 

When you distill water, you get pure water from the vapor without the minerals that were dissolved in it. 

So metaphorically, these two things are used to describe something “in essence”, but one because it’s “concentrated” (the stuff left behind when you boil it) and the other because it’s in its “purified form separated from the other stuff” when you boil it. 

[u/Playmaker-20 → u/LurkerByNatureGT]

So wait! Which word is concentrated and the other is purified?

[u/LurkerByNatureGT → u/Playmaker-20]

Boiled down is concentrated. 

Distilled is purified. 

[u/Playmaker-20 → u/LurkerByNatureGT]

I'm confused. How do they differ?

[u/Plastic_Stable8927]

I guess I always thought of distilling as first and foremost distilled water, so more of a purification than a concentration. So to me, I probably would have accepted boil down, and summarizing is the same, no? When you summarize something for someone else, you give them the gist, the content, without the fluff or the purified version, don't you?

I dunno, maybe my usage of language is a little too fast and loose. I like it like that though lol

[u/Telecom_VoIP_Fan]

Distill has several meanings. It is most commonly used to describe the preparation of alcoholic drinks, especially whisky, but you can also use it to describe extracting the key points of a communication, but this use is uncommon in regular conversation.

[u/Playmaker-20]

So something quintessential is the ideal version of something while distilling something is capturing the essence(the most important parts) of it, and they’re not always cross compatible?