We ask a lot of ourselves as babies. Somehow, we must grow from sensory blobs into mobile, rational, attentive communicators in just a few years.
Here you are, a baby without a vocabulary, in a room cluttered with toys and stuffed animals. You pick up a Lincoln Log, and your caretaker tells you, “This is a ‘log’.” Eventually, you come to understand that “log” does not refer strictly to this particular brown plastic cylinder or to brown plastic cylinders in general, but to brown plastic cylinders that embody the characteristics of felled, denuded tree parts, which are also, of course, “logs”.