Understanding

My first amusement with the concept of understanding was that I didn't fully understand what it meant to understand something.  After looking at the word for a few moments, I quickly broke it down to under and stand, or to stand under something.  Why would anyone stand under something?  I don't know... so, I went off to this wonderful place called the internet. 


Define Understanding: the ability to understand something


Well crap.


Define Understand: perceive the intended meaning of (words, a language, or speaker).


Much better!


Well then, what is the intended meaning of the word "understand"?  I'm pretty sure it was lost in time (Or so I hope, as I'm too lazy to search for it right now), so I'm going to forge my own ideas.  And to do this, I'm going to stick with my original train of thought of standing under something.  So, why would someone stand under an object?  The simple answer that I came up with: Because they have enough knowledge about it to know that it won't fall on them.  Or if it does, it won't hurt them.


At this point, it's getting increasingly difficult to talk about this topic without using the word "understanding".  To me, this means that this is a great word.  One without a lot of fluff tied to it.  So, I'm going to wrap up and start thinking about my next topic of how to go about "Understanding" things.   It requires a knowledge of relevant properties of the object, and the relationships that those properties has with the world and other things in the world.  The more numerous those properties are, or the more complex the relationships are, the more difficult it will be to understand something.


Silly final thought:  If you stand under something you thought understood won't fall on you, and it falls on you, you didn't understand it well enough and shouldn't have stood under it :P.