Last week I spent about an hour working up a spreadsheet to calculate some obscure price vs benefit analysis for a product I buy. Their pricing structure was technically broken, I realized—at least, the way they explained it. I waded gleefully through numbers and equations and dollar signs and came up with a much better attack for them—much simpler for their clients. Of course no one asked me to do it, but when Megan gets something in her head…

Marty looked on in fascination, as I proudly displayed my beautiful spreadsheet—and explained the results. “You should really go back to playing D&D,” he told me. “That’s exactly what makes someone a great D&D player, doing stuff like that.”

I responded by default: “But I don’t like it!” And then I corrected, and explained the following: I like D&D a lot. I like the story part. I like that math part. It’s only when they are put together that I’m not crazy about them.

Thus began a bizarre revelation.

A few months ago in the process of developing one of my many cashflow models, I got in the habit of writing financial stories for Marty and I. They would start in the present and go on for the next several weeks, detailing how much money we had in our accounts now, what invoices I expected to be paid soon, what projects I could pull in to pay bills that would be due later on. I covered alternate scenarios and Plan Bs (and Cs and Ds) and the result was just like a mathematical word problem—but backwards. It was a mathematical word solution.

I loved doing this. I did it for a long time and although it was time consuming, it allowed me to think very clearly and concretely about my finances, which have always seemed a little too complicated for me. (I have a better system now, but at the time, this was quite slick and really doing the job it was meant to do!) In this particular case, Math + English = Fabulousness. There is no doubt in my mind that my thought process functioned particularly smoothly in this way, and still does.

Now, I quit playing D&D because although I loved the math, and I loved the stories… I didn’t like parsing them together. And when I was in school—get this—I hated word problems in math class. I always had trouble wrapping my head around all but the simplest ones, and I could never figure out why they were so hard. I’m a reading-and-writing wiz, and I love algebra, but I can’t do word problems? Argh!

I made my peace with it, of course, but thinking back on it now there is a very strange set of facts. The resulting realization here is that I love words, and I love maths, and I love writing about math (when it suits my purpose). But for some reason I dislike and cannot stomach reading someone else’s writing about math. For some reason, it’s tedious for me to interpret or convert in my head. It’s difficult to parse. I get turned around, somehow. And so, I don’t like it. This is why I don’t play D&D anymore (though maybe I should write it, ha ha).

This blew my mind. What could it mean? In another life, I will be a brain scientist. Surely it’s significant in some way that I love to create words+maths but dislike taking them in. One tiny Math-English Receptor Wrinkle in my brain says, No way, no how! MUTINY!

I’m okay with it, and all. But isn’t it awesomely cool to wonder about?

Remember this: Would you like to rephrase that more positively? Yes, that. Remember that?

Tonight Tim Ferriss made a post regarding the ejection of certain words from one’s vocabulary. He suggests this for slightly different reasons than I originally discussed, but still interesting, still valid! He takes familiar staples such as ‘should’ and adds grand old warhorses such as ‘happiness’ and ‘success’ (and ‘good/right’ and ‘bad/wrong’). I happen to think he’s absolutely right. And also, er, absolutely correct.

Tim (who sometimes links multisyllabic words to their entries in Wikipedia as if to say, ‘Look at this cool word I know’, which is exactly what I would do) suggests that the usage of words such as these does not require a lot of complex thought, which is why we have used them to the point of meaninglessness – and might consider exercising our brains in order to find suitable alternatives that better describe the situation at hand. We love them, he says:

Because they remove the heavy lifting of real thinking. These socially-accepted throwaway terms are crutches for unclear thinking, just like “thing”, “stuff”, or “interesting”–enemies of good writers worldwide.

If you stop for a moment and think about it… there are quite a few words that are likewise easy to use. I sure as hell use them! Perhaps we should all spend our next date night with a raspberry merlot and a thesaurus…

Should. You know, scouring this entry for instances of Tim’s outlawed words is a pain in the ass, this late at night. (And ‘should’ was the one I’d ditched already!) But I still think he’s got a point. I definitely see the weakness in myself, and it sounds like an interesting challenge – especially since half the words he listed are words I use over and over and over. And over.

Sounds like rather a fun game, actually. Want to play?