Entry 269 — Problem-Solving
When faced with a mess as bad as my attempt to work of how we process language is in, as shown by yesterday’s entry, and with no idea what to do about it, a sound reaction is to drop it and go on to something else, with or without exclamations of despair. Or one can try anyway to do something about it. What I think is a clever response is to think of it as A General Problem, and try to work up procedures that may be of value in solving it. That way, you can imagine that you are working out a Method of Attack which may help others, or yourself in the future–even if it fails, since then it will indicate actions not to repeat. At the same time you can deal with a possibly intractable problem from a distance that takes some of the pressure off you.
So, my first thought is to focus on one element of the problem, with my main intent being to clarify what it is and what I need to understand in order to make sense of it rather than go all out fully to explain it. First question: where to begin. To decide that, I think I need to list all the elements involved. That, in fact, was mainly what I was trying to do yesterday. (Phooey. That means I have to read what I wrote yesterday!)
Okay, thew elements seem to be the word-flows: heard, read, said (formerly “spoken,” but “said” rhymes with “read,” so I like it better) and . . . mathematical (because I can’t think of a nice short, or even long, verb to use–assuming “heard,” “read” and “said” are verbs, something unimportant but would like to know). “Mathed.” No, not really, but it’s a temptation.
My problem now is that I have this intuition that I ought to be dealing with more than the four word-flows so far named. One might be the grammatical word-flow. I want to add a rhythmical word-flow, but tend to consider rhythm too insignificant compared to the others to merit a word-flow. I don’t like “rhythmical” as an adjective here, either. Maybe I’ll try “word-beat-flow”. . .
I’m going to think about it. I may try to finish a portion of a mathemaku I’m working on, too. I was going to use it today but found it as difficult to get in shape as the linguistics. I know I can get it in shape, though–it’ll just take a lot of drudgery.