Musing in Circles
Up until now, I’ve been doing pretty well using Google to help me remember a word that’s on the tip of my tongue by searching through approximate synonyms I can remember. But I’m finding big holes. I had the concept of “atavism” in my head but not the word. I didn’t need to know any fact or anything about the concept — I already had that. I had the definition of the word but not the word. Usually I have a set of synonyms and can look up definitions. But if you have the definition and there is no set of synonyms (other than a set of 1), you have a problem. There’s something fundamentally wrong with the idea of “key words.” It should be “key concepts”. Anyway, after 10 searches I got to “regression” in psychology, philosophy, biology, and skimming through scores of wrong entries I got to “atavism”. Anyway, I don’t think a concept is defined by an atomistic set of words. Yikes, I think I’m having flashbacks to something about Maslow’s idea of “syndromes” and somebody’s idea about “Gestalt.” Nevermind, I’m totally confused and I don’t know what point I wanted to make. I think I’ll Google it or something.
Ut oh. Maybe it is doing that: sets of concepts which I think is “ontology”? Oh jeez so how do I get in on the joke (easily without too much jargon and obfuscation). Yeah, that ought to be a song: “Jargon and Obfuscation, you don’t love me anymore. What do you want me to really actually know? Y’know like Freud’s now forbidden lament: “What do women want?”
Poet Laureate of the Primitive Planets 