Understood?
Person 1: This and this, and that and that…. understood?
Person 2: Yes
Teacher: [A complicated theory explained…] understood?
Person 2: Yes
Unless a topic is extremely alien to us or of unfathomable complexity relative to our knowledge, we tend to respond positively as the second person did.
Let's take a close look at our endeavour to understand.
- to know the meaning of something
- to know why or how something happens or works
- to know how someone feels or why someone behaves in a particular way
Etymology
Composed of under (meaning between/among, similar to Latin inter) + standan (to stand).
An average person normally uses only a few thousand words from their accessible vocabulary. While multilinguals may use more languages than monolinguals, they don't use all those languages with similar proficiency.
One of those very common words is understand. We use this word every day, in a myriad of situations with diverse contexts, as you can see in the definition of the word I presented.[1]
To understand our usage of the word 'understand', let's look into the synonyms:
"To seize together" (com- together + prehendere to seize).
"To feel about" or "clutch." It implies a firm hold on a slippery idea.
"To lay hold of." (Also, why we use it for arresting criminals—you "catch" the meaning).
From Latin discernere (dis- apart + cernere to separate). It literally means to sift or separate the truth from the noise.
Now, we can see that when we say we understood, it can mean any number of things. But in most cases, it simply means we perceived, or grasped (that is, we got a general idea about the state of affairs). Since this is the word we choose more often than its synonyms, it gets affected by an inflation of meaning to encompass most of the synonyms here.
In reality, when we have just scratched the surface of a subject and claim our inflated understanding of understanding on it, we hit a false wall of completeness.
While this is fine for many cases, it is not fine for others, especially in the fields where we need a critical comprehension of a concept.
Because we chose a fashionable blanket word to replace most of the synonyms, because we are oblivious to the nuances that make them synonymous but not the same, we are essentially creating a low-fidelity understanding of a subject while believing that we got it alright.
This is a cognitive shortcoming we build for ourselves by not being precise about which word to choose. Words are our vehicle for thoughts, and in turn, our capacity for thinking is as good as our choice of words.
To remedy this situation, we have to think about the words we are using. This is something easier said than done. Because we are thinking about the words we are using, that is, the words we are using to express another thought of ours. This is meta-thinking, breaking the fourth wall. It requires some active effort on our part and will reward us with ever-sharpening tools of thinking.
The actual list It is much longer. ↩︎