You kind of feel it’s a little bit hard to ideate and to be creative when you have such strong guidelines and direction.”. “There’s a template for where all the numbers should be,” Grann explains. The fact is, ideate means something slightly different from think, since it expresses a clear goal: “to form an idea.” This is a useful distinction in fields like design and information technology:
You might think that ideate is simply some kind of annoying recent business jargon, but in fact its use in English dates back to the 1600s, when it referred to Platonic philosophy, meaning “to form an idea or conception of.” When referring to an abstract or perfect example of something, we also use a word related to idea, Platonic ideal.Īnother related word is ideation, meaning “the capacity or the act of forming or entertaining ideas.” This word is used in specific contexts, such as in psychological assessments (“suicidal ideation”) and the creative aspect of technical jobs (“software-based ideation,” “digital strategy, ideation, and innovation.”) The usage of these verbs, however, is extremely imbalanced: think is, of course, a fundamental part of our vocabulary and is very frequently used, but ideate is not. We distinguish between thoughts and ideas, and, unsurprisingly, there are verbs in English for producing both. These words were entered in Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged edition of 1934:Ĭogitative “given to thought meditative” Other words derived from cogitare have fallen out of active use in English, but they show that this fancy way of saying “to think” was a rich source of vocabulary. As for me Daniel, my cogitations much troubled me, and my countenance changed in me: but I kept the matter in my heart. Cogitate means “to think carefully and seriously about something,” and it comes from the Latin cogitare (“to think”), itself formed from the combination of ¬ co- meaning “together” and agitare meaning “to drive” or “to agitate”-the root of agitate in English and, in this case, another figurative use of language, since it could also mean “to turn over in the mind” in Latin.Ĭogitate became the Latin-based verb synonym for the Old English-derived think, and cogitation the synonym for the noun thought. Thoughts can nevertheless be (figuratively) agitating, which gets us to the root of cogitate.
Though it may not share etymological roots with the Muses, the verb muse does have a relative in English that connects in a more literal way with their shared past: muzzle.īecause we cannot see thoughts, the words we use to describe the process of thinking are usually figurative, like the difference in the uses of active in “running to keep active” and “an active imagination.” We often “turn over” an idea. The muse that is the noun meaning “a source of inspiration” or, when capitalized, one of the nine Muses, indeed comes from the Greek name for them, which passed through Latin and French to English.īut the muse that is the verb meaning “to become absorbed in thought” comes from a different source: the Middle French word muse, meaning “the mouth of an animal” or “snout.” It’s assumed that the facial expression when one is thinking is what connects this word to absorption and reflection, and that the French verb had come to mean “to gape, to stare, to idle, to muse” because of the face one makes when lost in thought. To muse is to ponder or to think, and since the Muses are the source of inspiration for poetry, art, comedy, music, and dance in ancient Greek religion and myth, it might make sense to think of them also as the inspiration for deep thoughts.
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