Visualise something and you’re well on your way to understanding it better.
See what I mean? Take a look at my last post. But don’t your other senses get a look in? The words we use give us plenty of clues to what we are doing in our heads.
SOUND
I would have thought that after vision, hearing would yield the largest number of words and phrases that meant ‘understanding’. I was wrong.
I suppose you can say, “Yes, I hear you.” Something can ‘ring a bell’. Folks who fail to understand things can be ‘dumb’.
Otherwise that’s about it.
SMELL
I was able to sniff out even fewer ways in which we understand things with this very primitive sense – at least as expressed in words.
TASTE
Well, you can ‘digest’ a meaning, ‘absorb’ it or ‘take it in’.
TOUCH
Surprisingly, the sense of touch yielded quite a crop of phrases for grasping a meaning.
Yes, you can ‘grasp’ a meaning. Aha, then you ‘get it’. You’ve ‘got it’! A posher way of saying that is that you comprehend it. (Which only means you grasp it – from prehendere - in Latin.)
That is to say you’ve ‘got a handle on it’. You’ve ‘caught on’ or ‘cottoned on’.
In other words the meaning has ‘sunk in’. It has ‘got through to you’. Hurrah, they’ve ‘got it across’.
Those of a nautical persuasion can ‘fathom’ a murky meaning or even ‘take it on board’.
…Though of course that depends on whether they are ‘sharp’ or ‘thick’.
COME ALONG NOW, PUT YOUR WORST FACE FORWARD!
PAINTER 12 BRUSHES
Nice posts about symbolic expressions of comprehension. I like it when the senses mix it up a bit, like…if you’ll give me an elegant idea I can really put my finger on, it somehow resonates and I can savor the meaning. I wonder what happens in other languages along these lines…
Cheers!
pete s.
I can see (!) everyone is extending this beyond my original meaning, taking ‘understand’ to mean ‘evaluate’ as well. Still, but I suppose to evaluate something we have to understand it. Maybe, in fact, we can’t truly understand something unless we react to it emotionally. Besides, as you say Pete, the more senses we use in comprehending something, the more we enrich our experience.
Here’s a few more for you:
“Something smells fishy around here.”
“That leaves a bad taste in my mouth.”
“I wouldn’t touch that with a 10 foot pole”.
Thanks Deb. Good job I know these are just examples, or I might think you didn’t like my post!!
With a bit of thought we could probably come up with more but you thought of some I wouldn’t have
Anita
Hmm how about when something “smells funny” or “smells fishy” when we perceive that something is out of whack?
Thanks for your suggestion Bean! Actually I did think of ‘smelling a rat,’ which is similar – but I didn’t include it because I meant ‘understanding’ in a more general way. That is, simply the process of perceiving a meaning irrespective of the nature of that meaning, whether fishy, ratty, rosy or whatever.
Sorry. Maybe I didn’t succeed in – erm… putting my meaning across!