This is about two situations where we would need a new word to express the correct nuance:

(i) “ understanding the context”

You hear about historians getting into trouble because they said that this or that “has to be placed in its relevant context”. They are not trying to play down the negative aspect of some phenomenon. The problem comes from the word “context” which we associate with “circumstances” like in “you have to understand my circumstances”. It’s even worse if one says “You must understand the context” which is straightaway misunderstood as a request for empathy. To understand the historical context is not to look for an excuse, or to minimise the bad side of what happened: it just means “to have a cold comprehension of the historical background against which something happens, and to assess its impact in that light”.

Talking of history in general is a minefield. History is supposed to be a boring subject, yet say something bold such as “Bush was a great president” and you’ll see how tempers rapidly flare up. Actually nowadays with the spread of literacy and news channels, everyone does have a pet worldview and a sure recipe about how to fix the world. And people will pounce on you like eager talk show hosts.

For example, suppose I say : “It’s a horrible thing to say, but maybe the world would have been a worse place had it not been for Hitler” people will think I’ve gone mad. Yet think about it: in the 20’s the Weimar democracy was tottering to its crash. Apart from the Nazis, the other big extremist party was the Communist party. Before 1932, you had serious fights in the streets of Berlin between Nazi and Communist hoodlums. Now suppose that it had been the Communists who had won the election in 1932, or maybe even earlier (the Weimar system was so weak, that they kept having elections all the time as they couldn’t have a stable government). Then you would have had a Communist Germany, probably allied to Stalin’s USSR. The two of them would have gobbled down Europe like a pack of wolves. Once France is conquered by a Communist Germany, the commissars spread out to “liberate” the French colonies by setting up Communist regimes there too. And the USSR, on its side helps the Communists take power in China. By 1955, you have a Communist bloc stretching from France to Vietnam, plus large parts of West and North Africa.

You see the kind of misunderstandings that arise from saying this kind of thing. People will say I’m saying that Hitler was a good thing for the world etc. I’m not saying all this, I’m just coldly looking at history as if I was doing a postmortem of a chess game, and saying: suppose they had played it differently.

(ii) “ reading quickly”

In our hurried times, do we always “read” books or articles ? The fast food culture does exist with books too. We don’t always “read”, sometimes our eyes go through some lines, but did we really understand what it meant ? I wonder if I’ve read anything with attention for the past 20 years. I mostly skim over beginnings of paragraphs, linger over some interesting lines, skip over the next one or two pages to settle on something more interesting. Even then, there’s scarcely any book whose last cover I’ve reached. Yet there’s no exact word for my greedy, lazy way of reading, coz in general we still tend to see reading as a grave pursuit and we especially tend to believe that intellectuals absorb deeply whatever they read. I’m sure lots of them are like me, they used to read with focus and intensity when they were 20, but now they skim through new stuff. In any case there’s some stuff which I couldn’t bear to read again with real focus, it’s too scary, stuff like Kafka. I’d rather have Thackeray. More and more I tend to like my inner self to be comfortably numb.

Maybe the afterlife is like this, you become a ghost eternally roaming in the junkyard of your mind, groping and rummaging through comfortable recollections, ideas and fantasies. Maybe the mind is like a heap of garbage that somehow knows how to evacuate the toxic bit, and keep the easy stuff.