This ecology home page begins with links to all the pages on this site about words, terms, definitions, concepts and writing, because writing well reveals good thinking.

The layout makes a great focal point for a departure to the details of this web site that have to do with written composition and editing.

Virtually all of the content here is based on words that we use to create metaphors that describe the world.

For that reason this page links those images, concepts and explanations together so that you learn to filter this world in a literate manner and that you understand my views very clearly.

It is crucial that you understand that words, or terms –vocabulary really– are a primary means to describe what we learn. These are the essential literate elements in using metaphors to describe what is known about the world.

Words can both convey and hide meanings from us. But they are the gateway to the images that evoke a more profound understanding of:

1) what we know,

2) what we don 't know and

3) what we cannot know

about our cosmos.

Words have a sort of play, or elasticity of meaning.

You may already understand that some words mean precisely only certain particular things. But other words have many and often similar meanings.

√ For example: atom refers to the smallest building block of matter. Nucleus, however, may refer to the core of an atom or the dark staining center of certain sophisticated cells of plants, animals, fungi, or microbes. By analogy it may refer to the core, or center of things on which to focus your attention. Hence the idea of the nuclear family.

Then there are words such as "way," meaning how something is done, but way may also mean the fashion, manner, mode, or procedure. When words possess variable meanings depending on the context, we say that they are quite elastic because they may be defined in variably distinct ways. The actual meaning of elastic words then is dependent on meaning, grammar and syntax, of the surrounding words and phrases.