I enter a room and I see a table. But how do I know it’s a table? Well, it looks similar to tables I have seen before: it’s a horizontal surface on four legs.

After that I ask myself: “How would a very futuristic table look like?”. Well, it might be floating by itself without legs or any kind of visible base. If there are flying cars, why won’t there be flying tables? Or maybe it’ll be in a form of a magical fog which supports anything put on top of it. Just like the bed in Ray Bradbury’s “Ylla”. And yet, no matter how it works, it will still be called a table. Maybe a floating table or a fog table. Actually, it seems that float table is already a thing.

Why still a table, though? Because of its function as an elevated surface for putting objects onto. Whatever has a flat top raised above floor level can be a table. Even a stone in the middle of a prehistoric cave. Or a large upcycled wooden spool.

The way something looks and what it does seem to be the two main reasons why we group things by name. An umbrella is a portable device which covers someone or something. For example, from raindrops. A leaf which does that for an orangutan is also a sort of an umbrella, even though it wasn’t made by a human. A cocktail umbrella in a glass of Piña Colada can’t be realistically used to block much rain, but it looks just like the big one and so still belongs to the umbrella family. An umbrella which provides shade by blocking sunlight belongs to that family, too.

The same thing can potentially be both a table for someone bigger and an umbrella for someone smaller, depending on the way they use it. A human might be seating at an outdoor round table while writing an article on their laptop, while a dog might be regularly hiding under the same table from sunlight. The dog might not find the table very useful to put things on, but could regularly use it as an umbrella. Such differences in how an object is used might influence the naming: while English word for “umbrella” comes from Latin “umbra” (shadow), its German counterpart is Schirm, which means “screen”. This shows how the same object might be perceived either in terms of its function to provide shade or rather screen from something. In Sanskrit, छत्त्र (“chatta”) means not just an umbrella, but also “shelter” and “mushroom”, indicating its use both based on the use and the shape.

This naming approach also extends to abstract concepts. For example, what is an “umbrella term”? Well, it’s a term which covers a lot of different things. Sort of like the “umbrella” term. See what I did there? 🥴  An umbrella term isn’t a visible object, but rather a purely mental concept which shares the same purpose of covering something. But abstract concepts are also where naming gets tricky. I can put my finger on a table and ask someone if they also see it and if it looks to them like a table. But I can’t easily put my finger on what I would call a “democracy” or “oppression”. And I know for sure that “fun”, “comfort” and “boredom” are all words that describe personal, very subjective concepts. What is great for someone, might feel like the worst thing to me. The functions behind these words might be the same which would yield common definitions in a dictionary, but the way these functions are achieved might be very different. And it’s not like everyone uses strict dictionary definitions in their daily language anyway.

Abstract concepts lack shape: we don’t have universally accepted visual symbols for “fun” or “democracy”. What seems to replace the shape in these cases is feeling. I can totally tell if I’m having fun or if I feel bored. And while I perceive democracy as mostly functional concept, I also have very warm feelings towards it. Which is not the same what a dictator might feel, even if we superficially agree on the way it generally works.

Interestingly, form and function of even a real-world object are not always connected in the way that people universally recognize. While a table is something that has a horizontal surface to put things on, which conveys both its function and form, there are plenty of objects for which such relation is much less obvious. One day I experienced that profoundly in an odd museum in Berlin called Design Panoptikum. It offers to see a vast collection of weird industrial items thus exposing their form, while their function is left for the visitor to guess. Many of these didn’t seem to make any sense until the owner explained what they were used for. I remember something looking particularly weird, which just turned out to be a door handle for a shopping mall. I couldn’t guess how to use the thing until the owner said “it’s a door handle”. And I immediately understood how it can be used for that purpose. I was also surprised: how couldn’t I have guessed from the start that this was indeed a door handle? All it took to confuse me was a weird shape and it not being attached to a door.

Knowing how we name things is why I keep in mind that sometimes I might be using the same word for a different concept from someone I’m talking to. Often, arguing over what looks like position on an issue is actually an obscured linguistical misunderstanding. Either because we saw the concept as working in different ways or because we associate different feelings with it. And sometimes, one of us only saw door handle detached in a museum while the other one saw it attached to an actual door. Which translates to a difference in knowing a dictionary definition of a word versus actually experiencing the corresponding concept in real life.

“I support freedom of speech” can be both heard from someone defending basic civic liberties and from someone using it as excuse for hate speech or deliberate misinformation. Both parties seem to understand the concept differently. In the same manner, someone who have lived in a place where it’s not uncommon to hear about a person getting killed or imprisoned for exposing lies of the government, might not be immediately understood by someone who lives in a relatively free society. While for someone who actually rallies in support of totalitarian government, “free speech” could mean ability to lie, spread propaganda and verbally attack political opponents.

What helps to understand each other in such cases is moving from abstract concepts to describing specific actions:

“I support the right to speak anything about the government without fear of being persecuted”

“I support the right to spread deliberate misinformation, because I don’t want there to exist an arbiter who decides which misinformation is deliberate”

“I support the right to yell racial slurs at people”

“I support the right to say anything against God”

All of these fit under the umbrella of generic “freedom of speech”. However, what’s actually on the table is not always clear without mutual agreement on the meaning of words.