These three words will be my words for the last couple of days.
I might say here that my words of the day (WOD) come from encountered words, be they in reading, conversation, idle thoughts, concentrated thinking, or media.
Why “shed”? Because I find it to be somewhat culturally embedded. It is a kind of outhouse and sheds certainly appear outside of dwellings around the world, but they are seldom spoken of. I almost can imagine no setting in which a shed would appear except a spooky murder mystery. So for me, looking for vocabulary, I would like to know how each language labels those small out buildings, often constructed in a slap-dash manner.
Cluster is a word that begins in the physical world, applied to objects like grapes or rocks, but then come to be applied to more abstract things like words or ideas. This metaphorical use of language is fascinating and seems to lie at the heart of poetry and other high level applications of language.
Field also finds itself beginning in the physical world but expanding out into the realm of concepts, ideas, abstractions. The “field” of chemistry, “field-dependent thinking”, etc.
And question. I noted in Russian that the standard word for question, vopros, is used in contexts where the English translation would be issue, as in pedagogicheskie voprosy pedagogical issues. It also means problems, which brings me to the way in English we are using the word issue more and more where problem was used before. Why is this? What does this serve? What need does it fill?