Many words for the same concept

 I was wondering if we have many words for the same concept, so that our brain can prevent itself from tuning out, by listening to new words. Language kind of catering to brain limitations. It is like fixing hardware problems with software.

Google ad says stop hunting ... takes us back to the evolution instinct.

friend chatgpt to rescue ---

🧠 Why do languages have many words for the same concept?

There are a few major reasons:

1. Avoiding repetition keeps people engaged

Humans do tune out when they hear the exact same phrasing repeatedly. Varying words helps:

• keep attention

• maintain interest

• emphasize new shades of meaning

• prevent the mind from “glazing over”

This is well-studied in psychology and rhetoric.

Relevant theory: Habituation

If we encounter the same stimulus repeatedly, our response decreases.
Applying this to language: repeated wording becomes “background noise,” so variation keeps attention.

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2. Synonyms aren’t truly identical — they carry different shades of meaning

Words accumulate:

• emotional tone

• politeness level

• cultural connotations

• levels of formality

• poetic effects

• context-specific nuance

Example: ask, question, interrogate, grill, inquire — all mean roughly “ask,” but they feel different.

Theory: Semantic differentiation

Even when words overlap in literal meaning, they drift into different niches of use.

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3. Languages evolve through contact, borrowing, and history

English has synonyms because it absorbed vocabulary from:

• Old English (Germanic)

• Norman French

• Latin

• Greek

• Many other languages

So we end up with triple synonym sets like:

• kingly (Germanic)

• royal (French)

• regal (Latin)

This isn’t about attention — it’s about historical layering.

Theory: Lexical borrowing / etymological layering

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4. Novel phrasing signals importance or emphasis

Writers and speakers often vary wording intentionally to highlight or reframe ideas.

Example:

“The economy is slowing… in fact, growth is stalling.”

Two words for the same concept, but the shift adds emphasis.

Theory: Rhetorical variation / stylistic variation

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5. Our brains like novelty — and process repeated language less deeply

This is connected to your intuition.

• Repetition → lower neural response (habituation)

• New wording → slightly “surprising”, activates attention systems

• Variation → helps encode information in memory, since each phrasing creates a new association

Relevant theory:

The “novelty effect” in cognitive psychology.

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📚 So what’s the name for the idea that “varying words keeps people from tuning out”?

There isn’t a single official label, but it sits at the intersection of:

• Habituation (psychology)

People respond less to repeated stimuli, including repeated words.

• Novelty effect (attention psychology)

New stimuli get more attention, including new phrasing.

• Rhetorical variation / lexical variation (linguistics & rhetoric)

Effective communication often involves purposeful word-change to keep listeners engaged.

• Synonymy and semantic drift (linguistics)

Languages naturally produce multiple words that overlap but differ in nuance.

If you want one simple phrase that describes the phenomenon:

👉 “linguistic novelty for attention”

or

👉 “avoidance of habituation in language use.”

Those are the clearest descriptions of the core idea.

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If you'd like, I can also explain:

• why English has more synonyms than most languages

• how writers use lexical variation strategically

• or what brain imaging says about novelty and repeated words

 

Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue

Grandmother Tongue

I studied my mother tongue till 5th grade and repeated a lower level till 8th grade due to change in syllabus. I wonder how my writerly senses would have developed differently in both languages or any other languages.

'differences between spoken Swiss German and standard German and what those differences mean for Swiss Literature" - I was able to understand this where my language is more of spoken and casual while written is more formal.

Vedas

Indian knowledge tradition 

Level A VEDA_(Level-A)_ch-1

Level_B Veda_B

pancha suktam

Japanese the Manga Way: An Illustrated Guide to Grammar and Structure

This takes your Japanese reading to another level.

 

Japanese translation

 Jensen Huang statement in Japanese

プリトレーニング（事前学習）- pretraining

 puritorēningu (jizen gakushū)

メンタルモデル - mental model

mentarumoderu

質問 - question

shitsumon

ワンショット - one shot

wan shotto

パラダイム - paradigm

paradaimu

基盤（ファウンデーション）- foundation

kiban (faundēshon)

レベル - level

reberu

ポストトレーニング（事後学習）- post training

posutotorēningu (jigo gakushū)

マルチモーダルデータ multi-modal data

maruchimōdarudēta 

Language exchange

 If you are in on what the reverse language learners ie native speakers of the language that you are trying to learn, intersted in learning the language you already know then there is a bit of alignment in terms of the level of ease or difficulty of words athat you are both trying to learn.

Core2k like

Heard of core2k in this video How to get SO good at Japanese you stop thinking in English

ajatt

 Optimized Kore - 6k

50000 Japanese sentences

Pimsleur

Japanese Level 1

Japanese

I was planning on learning writing down the sentences heard in the Pimsleur lesson. Turns out that line 31 of 6k was one of the lines I learned by audio cementing it even more.

To Kanji To Kanji

If you are comfortable with Hiragana and its time to move to Kanji, then the ways to do it are - How I became fluent in Kanji explains how he practised writing all hiragana words in which a particular kanji was used and practising the kanji enough to be able to write it again while going through the hiragana words. He also laid out how to start off with the basic 80 kanji at N5 level of JLPT exam and then move on to increase the proficiency at say reading a Japanese language paper. You will see Pareto's law there. This way you are using hiragana to learn kanji and practising it too.

 Memorising Kanji with hiragana counterparts

There is a concept of Japanese brain while learning the language so you dont translate into the Japanese language and learn anturally, like it were your first language.That starts with sentence structure, verb conjugation.

Another easier way of learning Kanji is to learn Chengyu or proverbs. If you are like me and love poems then how about this Tao Yuanming poem.

Heisig method

250 essential kanji for everyday use = Seikatsu no naka no kanji shows pictorial source of Kanji.

The same initial hiragana and Kanji words that go with numbers feel more familair now, having learnt the days and months last week at the Japanese class.

 

Culture Is the Way: How Leaders at Every Level Build an Organization for Speed, Impact, and Excellence

Changing behaviors, mindsets, attitudes

Bringing energy

Awaken to a larger room - open space for envisioning

Alter the narrative for better

Writing about wildlife

 Find field notes and write the informatio for a lower reader level.

Lesser Long Nosed bats  prefer going through certain habitats instead of "As the Crow Flies". They can even be feeding from hummingbird feeders.

Why science literacy matters

The Boy Who Played with Fusion

Rocket Boys

Portrait of a Graduate

Is it true that the majority of individuals know how to lose weight but lack the essential motivation?

 This is tricky. There are few things that people know that need to be done. This sphere of knowledge might be big or small for different people but for any meaningful change, consistency is very important. Everything takes its time. Eigenzeit. For something like weight loss, to note what works for us, we have to be willing to experiment, document and change course. With so much involved, ‘how to’ is a small percentage of the success. There are opposing forces, our current environments, that people will have to control. Like the many levels of Russian dolls, each person might be at a different level of knowledge or illusion.

How do you make exercise addictive instead of a chore?

 To make something addictive, review all your habits. When your habits are associated with a reward, then it becomes addictive.

With exercise, exercise is the reward. Your awareness of your body, its heightened activated state, the heart rate going up, the sweat, the I am powerful state of mind is the flow state.

To get there, pick exercises that challenge you enough in the short term. With time, you will notice that your stamina and performance are increasing and can go for better goals in the longer term.

Once you have this working for you, this positivity will spill into other aspects of your life. Dont think of exercise as showing up only on the scale or at the doctors office, think of it as your whole life at the next energy level. It changes your presence for self and family. 

Do you change your way of losing weight? If yes, how and why? If not, why?

 What got you here wont get you there

At some point in your getting healthy journey, you will have to change some things. What works at one age might not work at another.

When I was a teenager, I would do yoga but obviously not enough due to time constraints for studying and I didnt know why I had to (more from the rebel sense of when nobody else my age has to).

Late teens again busy studying. Only in the last year of undergrad, I had time to go to the gym, by then I had learned some things from friends.

From those, walking and counting my calories helped a lot. It changed my persona to a fit person. At this point in life I was doing 30 min exercise in the gym everyday.

My next level of breakthrough came when I saw an elliptical left at 60 min done. I couldnt believe that. I picked that miracle from there and lo and below I dropped a pound every alternate day and lost about 25–30 pounds in around 3 months time. Dont ask me what I was eating. I was on a losing weight high.

Later when trying to lose baby weight, I figured weekends were the culprit. The inconsistency of the weekends in diet and exercise was washing away the week’s good behavior. That was a big aha for then.

Depending on different stages in life, you will realise that you need a different tactic to get to your next health goal.

Why do you work hard? What motivates you?

 "We don't rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to the level of our training." - Archilochus

What you can be certain of is the effort you put in. You do all that you can.

Startup Ideas

 

I still want to know why the best tool we have for measuring the diameter of a uterus is a blunt metal rod. Really???! Am I checking the oil level in my car?? (And I was totally in the dark that that had to happen first before I could even get the IUD).

— Dr. Emily Hodge (@theemilyhodge) October 21, 2021

Mirena Crash 

 

Facebook Portal Plus - Smart Video Calling 15.6” Touch Screen Display with Alexa

The coolest thing about this gots to be the smart camera. Still camera works best when you are in place, but when you are with kids or doing chores here and there, then the camera that follows you, really serves you hands free. Human recognition had to be more useful than just recognising them in frame. It had to move to keeping them in frame, no matter what. 

I love the story time animations. This morning I took a princess picture with a vtech kidizoom. If while reading a story, the screen can change background according to the stroy theme, main character or even have basic wiki pages or fun facts, that could be so much immersive. If it is age appropriate then even more. Context rich searching. If summaries or notes can come up, that we can clip away as the outcomes of that time spending, it takes note taking to a 3D level. If a product were to inculcate this paragraph, then such a product would be great for students, especially with a choice to revisit any older concepts or know further about an interesting thing, to keep those "hooks" in the brain to remember the concept.

It might be useful for presentations too, when you have more actions.

 

Roborock S7 Robot Vacuum and Mop with Sonic Mopping, Strong 2500PA Suction, Multi-Level Mapping, Plus App and Voice Control

Roborock S7  scrubs floors upto 3000 times per minute.

It uses ultrasonic technology to detect between carpet and floor, to switch from vacuum to mopping, while Dyson uses laser technology to reveal dust. 

Storytelling to influence

Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business by Kindra Hall

Yesterday, when is aw that my daughter was not happy wiht a well done drawing. I told her the Picasso's It took me a lifetime story. Its actually 40 years. But you get it, she got it that it meant the daily practice. We had to peel some onions for that.

Then I was reminded of King Bruce and the spider. After telling the story or bare bones of it, I realised how much I missed out. The context of the war for independence. Bruce thought that the spider's struggles were similar to his. They were similar int hat they needed perseverance in surviving. While the degree of ti was that, spider's was that of daily survival and basic needs of food and Bruce being King, his predicament was of much larger scale. How did the spider influence Bruce?

Yesterday while looking for a fitness app, I came across how Nike has made their training center free forever.  ntc compared to other programs gives you some more idea of the program. While I had alreadt joine dthe program, I saw the how to use nike training club app and realised how I couldnt give someone a better peek than this at joining the program. With these information for an interested person, I was able to reduce the friction of joining a path. Look at the funnel there. The first news is about the general audience. The second one about someone who is comapring different programs. And with the last one, if you drill down, its now to the nitty gritty of what exaclty is the path going to be.

Sometimes working with a person, might increase trust. And then your natural instinct of distrust too might kick in. When you hear the same advise from an institution or an organization, then you might validate the points independently.

While practising a speech, I was going through different drafts, I was using Kindra Hall's book Stories that Stick. I love listening to Kindra talk and her energy. Through that process and analysing experiences, I am able to see the difference between how detailed you have to go, to influence someone. When you are telling someone to do something, focus on your CTA or the call to action of the level it is at - is it the general, exercise is good for health, or here is a tool, here is how to use the tool, or I did this program and I am feeling certain way. Would you like to test drive that feeling?

How Bacteria talk

 

Talkative bacteria and quorum sensing.

"they don’t actually know each other is there, they can’t actually count, they can’t see. They’re measuring the concentration.

So, when the molecule hits a particular level, the bacteria detect it. And they all respond by changing their gene expression, which then changes their behavior. And they begin to carry out these group tasks."

Perfume analogy.

Kids and writing

 Why kids hate writing

My little KG started writing. Few weeks ago, she asked me for the topic. She thought of something, drew it first and then wrote on it. She drew a broom. She is taking no subject, nothing short of poetic to another level. She connected broom to cleaning and how she keeps her playroom clean. It is amazing to see such little kids read all the multiple choice statements and know the right answer.