Abhishek learns (as taught by Atanu) the importance of having a large vocabulary. education is about vocabulary (symbols) and thinking (manipulation of symbols.)
The fact is that while thinking requires words as the objects upon which it operates, thinking itself creates more words. As more people think in the world, the collective vocabulary of the world goes up and this is what increases our ability to think more clearly.
Words have a larger meaning than they seem to imply.
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Oliver Starr "stitch"
Jul 26th, 2005 at 3:20 am | #
I found this comment to be truly insightful. This is truly a sublime concept, and one that is diffitcult, I think to truly appreciate unless one is actually faced with a situation wherein something which can be clearly seen and identified in the mind’s eye, can never, due to the lack of appropriate vocabulary be properly explained to another or even acurately described.
Let me say that I pride myself on vocabulary. As a 7 year old I could legitimately whip just about anyone, including my Harvard educated father at scrabble – seriously . So for me to be at a loss for words or even at a loss for the appropriately nuanced word is a rare thing; yet I had an amazing dream- truly the most memorable dream of my entire lifetime to date, but I cannot clearly explain what it was that made it so special.
You see, the dream was quite simple and yet the vocabularly does not exist to describe what happened. I was digging in the garden behind my family home (in the dream I am a child)…quite purposefully, as if I knew I was going to find something. Lo and behold, I did find something: a new color. A color unlike any ever seen before on earth. A color from another place perhaps or born under a different sun…
Everyone asks me, predictably, “what color was it?” Of course there’s the rub. It isn’t any color that can be referenced by any color we’ve seen. I can’t say bluish or green or red or yellow or any combination…for that is not what it was. Words, my greatest ally, fail me. Perhaps that is the gift of the dream; to understand that there are limits to what words or language can define, forcing me to accept that there are certain things that cannot be conveyed. But still, the idea you’ve proposed – that vocabulary is in and of itself essential for clear thinking – seems to me incredibly perceptive and intuitively accurate. For me, the emphatic proof is that I simply cannot, and realize now that I will never be able to explain to someone exaclty what this new color looks like…
-Oliver Starr
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