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Article: Comprehension.
- Article from:
- ETC.: A Review of General Semantics
- Article date:
- October 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Institute of General Semantics. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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I.
I HAVE DETECTED an idea running rampant in the world to the effect that people can actually understand things. Our training inculcates this idea in us, and our language is structured in such a way as to almost ordain that the notion be one of our bedrock tenets. The word "comprehend," for example, derived from the Latin comprehendere, meaning "to grasp," invokes feelings of absoluteness in our society, as its relative, "comprehensive," invokes the feeling of "including all," though the best definition of the word is "widespread."
This is, of course, a sort of societal madness, since we can never possibly know all about anything. In order to actually ...