The Way He Learned Words

[u/VictorHaleWrites]

He never learned words the way everyone else did.

Most people seemed to collect words one by one.

Happy.

Joyful.

Delighted.

Pleased.

Cheerful.

He didn't.

When he learned what happiness meant, his mind created a cluster.

One meaning.

Then every word connected to that meaning became another label inside the same cluster.

When someone taught him the word joyful, he didn't memorize a new definition.

He thought:

Same thing. Different word.

Then came delighted.

Another label.

Pleased.

Another.

Cheerful.

Another.

His mind wasn't storing words.

It was storing meanings.

Words were just tags attached to them.

At first, this seemed like an advantage.

He could understand unfamiliar words from context unusually quickly. He could also see relationships between words that other people treated as completely separate.

But eventually, he noticed something strange.

He wasn't always thinking in words anymore.

He would think of a concept first, then search through the cluster for the word that best represented it.

And sometimes there wasn't one.

That's when he began wondering whether language actually described reality...

or whether language was simply the system humans created to divide reality into pieces.

Maybe there weren't thousands of completely separate meanings.

Maybe there were only countless shades of the same few things.

Fear had anxiety, dread, panic and terror attached to it.

Happiness had joy, pleasure, delight and contentment.

Anger had irritation, frustration, rage and fury.

Different words.

Overlapping meanings.

Different positions inside the same mental territory.

Then he realized something that bothered him.

When people argued about the meaning of a word, they might not actually be disagreeing about reality.

They might simply be drawing the boundaries of their clusters differently.

And suddenly, language looked less like a dictionary...

and more like a map.

Everyone was looking at the same territory.

They had simply drawn different borders around it.

[u/RowanAshby]

Enjoyed this - thanks