What exactly are those mental fluctuations that we call “thinking”? This incessant talking to ourselves inside our heads. Our mind’s motion. And are all thoughts equal?

There are lots of ways to answer these questions and many frameworks that can help with it. I often find it very helpful to start by looking for clues at the level of language itself. And this, most often, brings me back to Latin or Greek, where the original meaning of so many words can be re-discovered. Equipped with this linguistic perspective, I looked for words that can be associated with a thinking process. I then examined how those words came about and what insights they could offer us about various characteristics of our thinking process. So that’s what this post is about.