What I think about 'Thing Explainer'

Thoughts on only using simple words

A person who draws funny pictures wrote a book called Thing Explainer. He explains things like power boxes, sky boats and bending computers using pictures and the ten hundred words that people use the most in our language. Like this:

Everything that’s alive is made of tiny bags of water. Some living things are made of just one bag of water. These things are usually too small to see. These things are made of a group of bags stuck together. Your body is a group of lots and lots of these bags that are working together to read this page.

(The pictures often make it much easier to understand!)

I bought the book because I’m interested in simple language. I wanted to see what it was like to read about things in the simplest language possible. So, did it help me understand things like heavy metal power buildings?

In part. I think there are two ways you can read Thing Explainer.

1

Sometimes, I changed the simple words, in my mind, to the normal words that are usually used for the things. So Funny Picture Guy talks about ‘fire water’:

Deep in the earth, there are pools of fire water and fire air that power cars and sky boats.

‘Fire water’ and ‘fire air’ usually don’t mean anything to me. Instead, there are some short words that I usually use to talk about what Funny Picture Guy is talking about. This means that ‘fire water’ is actually less easy for me to understand than the other word, which is used less than 'fire' and 'water', but is still used quite a lot.

Maybe this is why some people, when they write, use words that very few other people know. I sometimes don’t like it when people use hard words like that. It makes their books harder to understand. They take longer to read and they're often less fun. But if you know a lot, those less-used words have a lot of meaning to you. Maybe, for people who know a lot, using simpler words is like saying ‘fire water’; it is too simple and feels kind of funny. Their friends (who also know a lot) will understand the hard words, just like I understand the real name of ‘fire water’.

So if you want to write and have people understand you, it's not just about using the most simple words. You need to know whether you’re talking to ‘fire water’ people, or to the people who know the most about what you're talking about, or to someone in between.

There are good and bad things about using simpler words. People made up a way of talking with less than two hundred words. Because it has so few words, it’s easy to learn, but it also means you have to use one word to talk about many different things—they have one word for ‘cat’, ‘dog’, and every other animal with four legs, and their only numbers are ‘one’, ‘two’ and ‘many’.

You can find out what this is like by playing Person Do Thing, a game where you have to talk about things using only about thirty words. You can get people to understand you with only thirty words, but it takes a loooong time.

2

Another way I read Thing Explainer was to try not to change the words in my mind, even if I knew them. This made me feel like I was in a strange world, like a made-up world from a book. It sounds like the kind of short writing where people talk about their feelings:

This used to be made from tree blood, but it’s usually made from a kind of plastic (which is made from very old dead things).

This boat visited the big world and its moons. Once it was done with its job, we told it to fly into the huge air world so it would burn up in the air, just like old space boats sometimes do on earth.

The machine works by throwing pieces of air down a hallway so they hit together really hard. The air hits with so much power that the pieces break in strange new ways, as if it shakes the air—and space itself—so hard that things fall out. [On the ‘big tiny thing hitter’].

I makes me remember this short writing, about how someone from space would find our world:

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the [power] of making colours darker.

It also makes me remember some very old, dead writers and thinkers I have read. They didn’t know as much about the world as us, so they often thought it was made of things like fire, water, air and earth. One writer said that minds are made of fire, air, wind, and another part that doesn’t have a name.

Some people try to understand the world better by coming up with an idea about how the world works and then trying things out to see if it really works that way. For these people, a lot of their words come from words (from other ways of talking) that mean simple things like fire, water, air and earth. Like, the small pieces of stuff that things are made of have a name that means ‘can’t be cut’, because in the past they couldn’t be cut up. (Now people have worked out how to cut them up).

The kind of stuff that there is most of in the world has a name that means ‘makes water’, because it is one of the kinds of stuff that makes water (water is also made from the stuff that we breathe). The kind of stuff that there is the second most of has a name meaning ‘sun’, because there’s lots of it in the sun (even though, funnily, there is even more of the first kind of stuff, the ‘makes water’ stuff, in the sun).

I like the idea that the namers tried to give these things simple names like ‘sun stuff’ and ‘makes water stuff’, even though they don’t seem simple to us.

In our way of talking, simple words come from one part of the world—the area where we started talking this way. Harder and longer words came from the areas below, when the people from there came into the top area.

Once, someone thought ‘what if all hard words had come from the top bit instead?’ and they wrote this.

Maybe this is why our way of talking is hard: it often has simple words and harder words for the same thing!

3

When you have to use only simple words, it’s harder to write a lot. If I was using all the words I know, this would be two times as long, probably. It also feels like I am saying very simple things that everyone knows. I wonder if I would think this if I had used all the words I know, or if using more words would have made me feel like I was having better and newer ideas.