Fragments: Words and the Mind (II)

Fancy Words

If something is not comprehensible to you, first, don't be afraid. Second, it is just disguised by fancy words put in place in order to make them seem...civil, orthodoxy or formal, but at the root it can be stripped down to very simple and silly facts, almost always recognizable human experiences and daily thoughts.

What i need to do to understand is to strip the fancy words down to the very root of its meaning, believe nothing is incomprehensible to me and relish each moment of comprehension.

"he understands anything that has happened to him, it is all that he has, his ultimate pride. "

If that will be my ultimate pride, then to discern any plain truth from a world of fancy words and the froth of nonsense will be my ultimate weapon.

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Metaphors

When I can't see something clearly enough, I use figurative methods.

But people who think clearly speak plainly. The closer we are to the truth, the more clearly we see, and the plainer our language can be. Plain language is more advanced than metaphors or similes.

Metaphors are a good way of demonstration, of course. But before we explain anything to other people, we should make sure that we know the very truth of the it already. While we are approaching the the mountaintop of truth, we should not be satisfied to stop at the clouds of metaphors.

当一个问题在我的脑子里没有成形的时候，我只能用比喻来描述他的抽象的面貌。

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When Words Fails Us

什么时候我们需要丰富的肢体语言？

1) 初掌握一门外语，不能明确表达出自己的意思；
2) 不善于表达，而刚好情绪喷涌或有一个复杂的思想要表达；
3) 这门语言本身学到极致的时候仍然缺乏表现力。

曾经新闻里看到一个畸形儿上下眼皮没有分开，他成天痛苦得将嘴巴张到最大。人的思想意识之于用于表达它的语言，就像浩瀚的宇宙之于人的感官。人所能运用的语言越丰富，他的思想表达就越充分，那些辅助的条件，如手势，表情，其它肢体语言，甚至于书面的感叹词，惊叹号等等就越没有必要。所以，我认为，肢体语言少是语言表达能力强的表现，而在演讲中，这个似乎没有被大家接受，人们还是喜欢那些充满flourish 的选手，不管是否生硬或恰当。

"When you're digging down deep to bring out emotion, there are a lot of places to dissipate, and the hands are one of them. No hand gestures. What can happen is, the power that were coming out of the fingers and the toes can come out of your eyes. "

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Language and Cognition

"We can only see the universe through the limited prism of our senses." our senses are more precisely windows through which we can have a limited view of the vast cosmos. And human consciousness collectively is almost as vast as the cosmos. Words are the limited means we can use to peer through and describe our thoughts.

"Class in America is like sex in Victorian times: people believe that if no one talks about it, it will just go away."

This is a part (the most widely ignored part) of information abuse, where people (with the power of information distribution, purposefully or out of mental laziness ) refuse to give some existing notion (thoughts, phenomena, differences, truth, etc.) a proper name or put them forward. Since "words are a lens to focus one's mind", if we don't give the thing a name, pin it down, define it and use it, it will be drifting in and out of our consciousness. When it's number is up, it will just vanish. Thus, escaping the consciousness and attention of people on the receiving end of information.

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Imagery and Mental Pictures

Up until I have known an amount of words, but what does it mean that i know them? A small portion of them are very familiar to me due to everyday usage: no problem about that. But among them are also words which are so overused, misused, misunderstood, neglected or worn-out that they almost mean nothing to either the speaker or the listener when uttered. A great deal more of words, less frequently appeared, produce the same effect, but due to different reasons, either i don't care about their meaning or their appearance now and then make a false impression that i already know what they mean. So when confronted, these words are the easiest to escape my consciousness, because without stirring up a vivid mental picture, they are nothing more than a word. A word without carrying a meaning is a nonsense.

As i mentioned before, words are windows to peer through our vast consciousness. The ultimate goal of using words is to achieve free exchange of man's consciousness. A passage, made up of hundreds or thousands of words, is a huge glass wall consists of such little windows. The core of the reading problem is to make sure that we actually see something through each of the windows, and the clearer the better. Thus coming to the accuracy issue.

When i was watching The Mentalist, the one with the casino, Patrick Jane showed how he remembers all the cards: he chooses his favourite and most familiar place, where his father used to take him to, something like a palace, and he imagined each cards to be some certain characters, each of them in one of the chambers in the palace...This is worth thinking about further, but here i will just mention the power of mental pictures and imagination, and in addition, the surprising feats of memory concerning something you really like.
As words can appear both on paper and by air wave, the mental picture thing is also applicable to listening.

Why we think it's OK to eat beef and pork, but not rabbits? Because we are so accustomed to eating beef and pork that these two words succeeded in cutting off their association with cattle and pig. We seldom have a picture of cattle in our mind when eating or talking about beef, do we? And as to rabbit, you know it's hard not to picture a lovely, tiny, red-eyed rabbit.