Words as Instruments for Explaining
Words are the chief instruments we use for explaining. Of course, many other devices—pictures, numbers, charts, models, etc.—are also used; but words are the prime tools. We do most of our explaining with them.
Words, however, are not very good instruments. Like a stone arrow-head, a word is a clumsy weapon. In the first place, words mean different things on different occasions. The word “line,” for example, has more than fifty meanings listed in a big dictionary. How do we handle the puzzle of many meanings? As we grow older we gather experience and we develop a truly marvelous capacity to listen to a sentence and then fit the words together into a pattern that makes sense. Sometimes we notice the time lag while our brain hunts for the meaning of a word we have heard but not grasped. Then suddenly we guess the needed meaning, whereupon we grasp the meaning of the sentence as a whole in much the same way as the parts of a puzzle click into place when solved.
Another trouble with words is that often there is no good way to tell someone what a word means. Of course, if the word denotes a physical object, we can show several examples of the object and utter the word each time. In fact, several good illustrations of a word denoting a physical thing often tell most of its meaning. But the rest of its meaning we often do not learn for years, if ever. For instance, two people would more likely disagree than agree about what should be called a “rock” and what should be called a “stone,” if we showed them two dozen examples.
In the case of words not denoting physical objects, like “and,” “heat,” “responsibility,” we are worse off. We cannot show something and say, “That is a ···.” The usual dictionary is of some help, but it has a tendency to tell us what some word A means by using another word B, and when we look up the other word B we find the word A given as its meaning. Mainly, however, to determine the meanings of words, we gather experience: we soak up words in our brains and slowly establish their meanings. We seem to use an unconscious reasoning process: we notice how words are used together in patterns, and we conclude what they must mean. Clearly, then, words being clumsy instruments, the more experience we have had with a word, the more likely we are to be able to use it, work with it, and understand it. Therefore explanation should be based chiefly on words with which we have had the most experience. What words are these? They will be the well-known words. A great many of them will be short.