How to find the answer when you don't know how to ask the question?

Modern technology is simply wonderful.  If I want to learn how to spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or discover the name of the capital city of Bhutan I have only a few clicks and the information presents itself.  

But it happened yesterday.  It happened several times yesterday.  I wanted to ask a question, but I didn't know enough to know what questions to ask.  

It started when I was typing.  I wanted to spell the word "batchular" "bachelor " only I couldn't figure out how to spell it well enough that the computer could know what I was saying.  I'm on the more extreme end of dyslexia so this happens a lot, but usually technology comes to the rescue.  I found this great spellcheck called Grammarly which doesn't auto correct my words into nonsense.  But even a brilliant programme like that still has trouble with "batsuler" or any of my variations thereupon.  It comes up as "bat supper"  Even google has no idea what this word might be and gives me search results relating to batman.  Spellcheckers are wonderful things (when they aren't predictive or autocorrect) for a Dyslexic like myself, you probably wouldn't understand me without it, but still they aren't mind readers.

Which brings me to a more interesting situation that also happened yesterday.  I got a wonderful present from a friend who knows my style.  It's a clay cooking pot, but it has a hole in the middle.



You think I can figure out what words will unlock google's mysteries about this pot?  Not a chance.  I gave up after 40 min.

This has a much easier solution than bouncing around the thesaurus until I find the right word - the solution is permies.  

I'll chat about the pot properly later, but right now I'm fascinated by the situation when we know we want an answer, but we don't know enough about it to ask the question.  I think this is the kind of situation where friendly forums really shine.  

Anyone else ever have this kind of moment?

Wow, gorgeous pot.  That's a steamer from China.

Forums rock for finding answers and questions.  I get so much reading this site.  I need to stop lurking and start asking more.  But sometimes I don't know which forum to ask in.

For the pot, I tried googling some words and then looking at the image option for the results.  I googled what I knew - 'ceramic cooking pot hole' - and picked out the most similar images and read the pages that they came from.  This brought up the idea 'steamer', so I googled 'ceramic steamer' and ended up with this image



which was labelled 'ceramic vegetable steamer'.

It looks sufficiently similar to the one in your photo that I think it's a hit!

More about how to use it: http://www.ceramics-in-france.com/en/pagen3.3.html

I get hung up while looking for the right words too.  If you've heard me speak, you'll know how often I use the wrong term or word. It can be a hard to listen to me as I search for the right word to convey my jumbled thought.  A year ago I had a pretty serious illness and my brain kinda swelled up and tried to cook itself. It almost did too, but I survived and now my brain works a little differently than before.  I'm told I'll continue to improve as time goes on.  That seems to be the case so far.  Anyway... when I can't figure out what to say, I just keep talking until either I get my point out or somebody stops me. LOL  That's how I deal with searching google too.  I just keep wording things differently until I get what I'm looking for.

So for the pot above I went through the brain storm and just started asking the google image search to narrow it down:
At first I laughed at myself for thinking it was a gag gift from the olden days. It looked like something you give to the guy who always waits till the last minute to empty his chamber pot. LOL Anyway...

ceramic cook pot with hole (nope)
ceramic cooking pot with center hole (nope)
ceramic pot with hole in center (nope)
ceramic old cooking pot with vent (nope)
ceramic steaming pot with center hole (BINGO!)


When I'm looking for the right spelling of a word I usually try a few different iterations of how I think it should be spelled and if I come up with nothing... I Porky Pig that shi shi shi shi....  STUFF.    In other words,  I find another suitable word.


Speaking of weird pottery  have you ever seen a Pythagoras Cup?   Pretty interesting.

I never had a problem finding the right words, until . . . menopause. Menopause has stollen my words. I get half way through a sentence, and then the words are just gone! Words are very important to me, so it is extremely frustrating and irritating. But it has made me greatly aware of the troubles others have lived with their whole lives. All I can say is, I better get them back when all this nonsense it over!

Doesnt work in this case sadly as there doesnt seem to be a similar enough photo to this on the net. However a way to search without words is by using tineye, you upload or put a link to an image and it searches for similar images. That way you might find an image which has the appropriate search words associated with it.

https://tineye.com/

I wonder if forms of trauma can have the same affect of searching for words? This is a question and not a statement by any means, but let me expound...

I used to be pretty confident, straight forward and as a safety coordinator for a major railroad, used to sit in boardrooms and counter profit with worker safety pretty strongly. Then I spent 9 months at Ground Zero, then my 19 year old sister was killed in an car accident, then my parents house burned down, and my wife of 9 years left me for a man she met on the internet. It was a lot to endure.

After all that, I found myself searching for words, not confident at all, my voice would break as if I was about to cry when there was no reason too, and I dreaded meetings and crowds. I was not longer able to handle the corporate world, and in some ways have retreated to my farm and raise sheep, often not getting out for a week at a time. I do go to church, and do okay where my current wife are counselors with Divorce Care, but when asked to talk about or farm at church...oh my, was I scared. I pulled it off, but it was tough. Our church has 350 people or so, so to stand in front of them and not just a small group of divorced people, I struggled, I searched for words, my voice broke a few times.

I can pin point the change in me, but I am not sure if that is it, or even if I officially have PTSD? I do have seizures too, and take 3 horse-pills every day to control that, but rest assured, I feel your pain R. Ranson, and any others on here that deal with this.

As for the clay pot, I am really looking forward to chicken soup tomorrow.


As for finding the answer when you don't know the question.

Today I had someone ask me a question. Her customer called her and asked for this thing that his customer asked him for something he never heard of.  It's like a game of Telephone (which might be called 'Chinese whispers' in other countries).  The original customer had heard about it from a friend... no one really knew what they were talking about, except it sort of had something to do with a tool I know about.  Each time, the question had gotten more confused.  By the time it got to me it was completely messed up.  No wonder google was no use to them.  

What strikes me as really, really funny is that it took me all of 10 seconds to figure out what the original customer was wanting.

I think Forums are like that.  Even when we don't know the question, we can often find the answer.  Sometimes it just takes a bit of courage to ask.

I found one just like this only a different color.  It makes the best chicken soup.  But takes ages and the steam escapes around the side.  

Resoivar
You know,a place to store water or other liquids?

Sometimes I change entire sentences around one word substituted for the one I really want.

William Bronson wrote:Resoivar
You know,a place to store water or other liquids?

Sometimes I change entire sentences around one word substituted for the one I really want.

Reservoir.

Kill me, I went through the spelling bee mill twice in my early teens. I couldn't diagram a sentence to save my life but I learned the verb tenses (lay, lie, lying, laid, etc) and how to spell.

I often find though if you can't find something on a general google search, try images. Look for a picture. Click on something and it will usually show you several others related, and you may find it through the dive into a rabbit hole method.

I'm reminded of this comic: poorly drawn lines

If I can't think of the word required I search for an antonym e.g. Can't recall the word Bachelor so look up Spinster. Then perhaps search synonyms for it.

I REALLY dislike 'wrong' versions of spelling, so-called [insert country name]-English. Notwithstanding 'native' slang words like pal, mate, buddy, cobber, etc.

To me there is ONLY one way to spell English words and that's the way the Poms/Limey's spell it. After all, it's their language we chose to adopt, so have an obligation to do it right.

I suspect the American 'version' was borne out of sheer contempt: an apparent and perplexing dislike for tea in Boston, followed by that little independence spat over taxation. So, they decided to bastardise the language just to spite Georgie The Third.

Slap those troublesome colonials in irons and throw them in gaol, NOT 'jail'.

Our shared ancient history explains grammatical errors well:

Romanes eunt domus!


(At school, if we got it wrong, we were threatened with a cane - a bit softer than castration with a sword ... we've gone soft on education!)

I am a reasonably decent speller, but once in awhile I have a brain fart and just cannot remember how to spell something close enough to do an internet search. So, I have learned to do a search for the definition. A bachelor is an unmarried man. So, I did a search on “unmarried man” and got this hit, which listed bachelor as a synonym.

https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/unmarried

As for other answers with unrefined questions, I try to frame the question as best I can and then modify as I read. It may take time, but I learn quite a bit about other things as I read.

One reason I like DuckDuckGo as a search engine is privacy - they don’t track my queries and create a profile of me to shove ads in my face. The other reason is that the predicted question selections they offer, from other people’s searches, give me some excellent leads.

ceramic cook pot with hole (nope)
ceramic cooking pot with center hole (nope)
ceramic pot with hole in center (nope)
ceramic old cooking pot with vent (nope)
ceramic steaming pot with center hole (BINGO!)

Here are a couple search tips that I haven't seen mentioned - from back when you had to learn how to use the internet in school.  I've got a pretty good search engine track record, so I think they're still useful :)

You can pretty much ignore articles, conjunctions, basic prepositions (in, to, of, etc.), and word order, and just put in the main words you want to look for.  

So,

... pot with center hole
... pot with hole in center  

are the same search (pot centre hole), unless you put quotation marks around the phrases.  Then you'll get only results that are worded exactly the way you typed it out.  If you know exactly what you want this can be handy.  If you're not sure what you're looking for, you want to keep it more general.

If you keep coming up with pictures of tagines, like I did, put -tagine in your search query and the engine will exclude that word so you don't have 4000 tagine pictures to scroll past.

Deb Rebel wrote: ...


Kill me, I went through the spelling bee mill twice in my early teens. I couldn't diagram a sentence to save my life but I learned the verb tenses (lay, lie, lying, laid, etc) and how to spell.

And yet here you are, a grammatical genius, as are all native speakers of any language, children, who by age three have the vast majority of the rules of grammar figured out.