Short cut to life

I am very fond of short cuts. When I am on a computer I like things to go blazing fast. There is a limit to how fast one can go in terms of physical motion. For example I can run at 3 meters per second where as the world record is just better than 10 meters per second. To do things faster what one can do is combine actions into groups and then deal with these groups. In one go you increase your capacity manifold. Of course you now need to remember these groups or codes.

In almost every field there are these shortcuts which you realize the importance of after some time. It is almost never a good idea in my opinion to begin any new learning with shortcuts. After all shortcuts are for something and you should be familiar with that something before you assigning shortcuts to. After a while though shortcuts become almost a necessity. Sooner or later almost everybody starts using them, but the ones who learn them earlier do much better than the others. Take the game Age of Empires for example. Each and every advanced player uses shortcuts for almost everything. Learning the shortcuts is almost part of learning a thing.

One day it just stuck me that language has shortcuts and they are called words. Words are the means of communication and they communicate something about the world we live in and our experience of it. The world is so complex and our experience is many times more complex that it would seem that describing it would be an impossible task but that problem is solved by generalization. We have words that represent things in general and not exactly. In fact you could hardly ever be exact. When we say something is a table we mean roughly something with four straight legs and a flat top. This description is so vague still it lets us communicate. If we were to have different words for every different table we will soon exhaust our capacities. Usually we know a few such words and describe everything vaguely. As we grow we start learning more and more words and our descriptions become more and more precise. There are two ways of describing things more precisely. Either we can use a lot of description composed of different words to describe something exactly or you can assign a word to the precise meaning. A good way of understanding this is to look at the dictionary. It has the word which have a specific meaning and the text that describes is the multi-word version of it.

The more words you know the less words you have to use the more elegant you sound. Two people might be saying the same thing and one might sound like a chatter box and the other one a gentleman. If you use the exact words you can describe more in the limited amount of time that world allows you.