Richard Feynman is a name I only first came across this past year, but since then I've seen it crop up a lot. He was a winner of the Nobel Prize in physics and for us commoners, probably best known for his work on the atomic bomb during World War II. I picked up a copy of his auto-biographical stories found in Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!, described as 'adventures of a curious character.'
There's a part where he goes to Brazil to teach physics at a university and discovered that although the students can recite physics definitions and statements, they can't actually apply the information. I remember taking university calculus courses that had similar exams each year. So in the practice exams, 3x would show up in an equation and on the actual exam it would be 4x. I could apply the formula, but I couldn't explain what the coefficients or variables meant. I gamed the exams enough to obtain a decent grade in the course, but to this day, I still don't actually understand what calculus is or how it works.
This got me thinking about how difficult it actually is to learn something new, beyond the superficial level of recalling facts and information, to the level of ingrained knowledge, as if by instinct, the way we can ride a bicycle.
It's the difference between superficial information and actual knowledge. I recognize this in writing, I will reach for common phrases, clichés, and jargon words when I lack understanding.
We borrow pre-made phrases because they're easy, and they likely did originate from something useful. But overuse dulls their meaning over time. The challenge with using pre-made fabrications is that they blur and muddy the meaning of what we are really saying.
I think of George Orwell's essay, Politics and the English Language, and his book 1984. There's a part in 1984 where a government official is working on reducing the dictionary in order to reduce citizens' thinking. Language is important because the words are the basis of our thoughts. When we use pre-made fabrications, we're not only limiting our words, we're limiting our thoughts.
Communicating requires first a thorough understanding of what is being said, and second, a way of saying it precisely. The aim is for another person to receive the message as closely as possible to the original, with minimal distortion. It's like that game of broken telephone. The starting message that gets whispered to each person often ends up distorted by the time it reaches the last person. A cliché usually distorts, its very nature is to act as a shortcut. The recipient, after hearing a cliché, will understand generally what you want to say, but he or she might not understand precisely. And perhaps none of us can get to exactly, but there's a good amount of space between an identical replica and the bland generic.
The more nuanced and complex the message, the more important it is to be selective in the words used to attain precision.