Shades of meaning

[corvideye]

I had a dream where I was in a group taking a bunch of health evaluations, some also related to psychology/ perception. They were done in a verbal/visual format, where I would look at a diagram or diorama and describe my reaction to it, such as a scale of how tired you feel on an average day. I was struggling with some of it, because the diagrams just weren’t logical, didn’t make sense to me, and I kept having to ask for clarification, and feeling embarrassed because it was designed to seem quite simple to most people, and I was apparently overthinking it. Then we had a perception test question about two guys who had to divide up some colored crayons in a certain way, a logic puzzle where it's not possible for them to have identical sets. One man wanted one of every color, while the other didn’t care if he had some color duplicates, such as two white crayons. The woman giving the test then said, “What do you think of that?” I realized that the best answer was that the result was “not fair, but equitable.” She seemed quite surprised that I had come up with that, and wasn’t even too clear on the meaning herself. I was seeing the fine distinction of meaning that ‘fair’ meant in an absolute, empirical way: everyone gets exactly the same things. Whereas ‘equitable’ meant symmetry, balance, both sides are happy, even if what they get is not of identical worth.

Upon waking, I don't think the words really carry that exact distinction, but I find it interesting... and now I kind of wish they did. It would be a tidy expression of absolute vs. situational morality. Not everyone can get the same things, but that's sometimes okay, because not everyone wants the same things, either...

I suppose it's not too surprising that my subconscious continues to kick around nuances of word meaning even when I'm asleep!