Overemphasis On Words

People who act like the mental light bulb has turned on when literally all they have been told is the contrived term for a concept they still know little to nothing about and have just heard of for the first time are, well, foolish.  They are irrational.  If you just know the word for something, you still do not know what that thing is, only what it is called!  From this alone, you could not even know which concept is being associated with the word.  Spoken language literally illuminates almost nothing on its own in this sense, and certainly nothing of importance.  Someone could be familiar with a multitude of words for an idea, even in different languages, and lack knowledge of what exactly it is.

Some people are so infatuated with words, and perhaps moreso with the illogical elitism expressed in favor of people who read or claim to read (at least certain books) than with words themselves, that they focus very disproportionately on language and articulation.  Are words important?  For the pragmatic purpose of communication, yes.  They are quite literally the only way short of direct telepathy for one being to get highly precise or abstract concepts across to another such being.  Do they have such a high status that concepts are trivial compared to the arbitrary words for them and that familiarity with words means you know concepts or reason itself?  Of course not.

If you were to look out for instances of other people reacting as if they have learned far more than is possible from simply being told of a term that is new to them, it might not be difficult to find plenty of cases.  Whether because of some personal delusion or the desire to look "intelligent" before others, this exaggerated reaction is somewhat common, at least in my experience.  One might see, among other things, a person encounter a word for something like a psychological condition or a personal finance tool and then treat the word like it has grand significance or special power.  

If they knew the nature of the thing already thanks to logic, the term is unnecessary for this altogether even on the level of prompting.  And if they did not know, the word reveals basically nothing in isolation, as already stated.  While subjective excitement or gratefulness for having a word for something has its limited place, whatever the thing it refers to, it is just a word.  Communicating is where language is truly vital, not understanding an idea.

If a concept is neither logically self-necessary (only logical axioms are) so that there is literally no excuse for a conscious person to not grasp it at some point early in their life nor in some extended way obvious in light of reason (that introspective states of mind cannot be illusions, that skin color is always objectively irrelevant to personality traits, etc.), then it might only come to mind if someone else brings up the idea using words or uses a word and then is pressed as to what it means.  Absolutely!  But, only someone who is not being rationalistic would ever conflate a term with an idea, as if the former is anything other than random invention used to communicate the latter, or would ever, even worse, elevate the former over the latter.