Descriptions

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It seems that the more important something is in our lives, the more words we have to describe it. For instance, when we are experiencing a dry spell in the weather, chances are that ‘rain’ ceases to be just ‘rain’, but rather gets a more descriptive word attached to it.
As long as it is not truly raining yet, there can be a mist, a fog, a drizzle… Then when the amount increases it may ‘look like rain’, or ‘almost forming puddles’. And then, when there finally is that great big downpour everybody has been waiting for for so long, it is ‘raining cats and dogs’.

When there is too much precipitation in an area, the focus may be how to drain all that water from roads, pastures and gardens in such a way that it doesn’t hinder our lives. And suddenly sewers, channels, conduits, ditches, culverts, ducts, pipes, gutters, troughs, sluices, spillways, races, flumes, and chutes become important.

Language is funny like that.

But then of course it is not language in and of itself that brings all those words to mind. It is our thinking, our focus that brings all the words pertaining to that topic to the foreground. The more something is on our mind, the more we are pondering a concept, considering where it will lead us, contemplating the consequences ~ the more ways we will find to describe what is going on.

That way we give ourselves the opportunity to be more and more precise in our account on what is going on in our lives, and in our direct environments. We give ourselves a chance to be more detailed in our explanation.

As language tends to be descriptive, depending on what is important in a particular area, a specific culture, or a distinct way of life, those concepts almost always can be described well, and in enormous detail, with a single word or sentence.

Looking at this from the opposite direction, one could say that when we need many words and sentences to describe something, it may be a concept or topic that we are not (yet) very familiar with. It may be something we have just discovered, or something that we are finding has a greater meaning and significance to us than we had thought up to that point.

And therefore we could perhaps also state that the greater need we feel to be detailed in our depiction of what is going on in our lives, the more important it is to us…

Whichever way we look at it, listening carefully to the descriptions used by someone can give us a whole lot more knowledge on what is going on than just the factual information we are given at that point in time…
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