Some 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, early societies living in Turkey and Armenia spoke Indo-European: the language from which modern European languages have descended. Their vocabulary for concrete objects and simple actions paints a vivid picture of prehistoric life: “bear”, “wolf ”, “monkey”, “wheat”, “apple”, “wheel”, “axle”, “tree”, “father”, “carry”, “see”, “know”, and so on. Words for less concrete aspects of the world were a long time coming. The adjective for “big” in Indo-European, for example, was “mega”: the root of our “megabyte”. This is an abstract word because it can apply to many different kinds of concrete objects; both bears and wheels can be big. Many centuries passed before humans were able to extend this to the very abstract concept of “bigness” or “size”: a general noun for an abstract quality. In Homer, who composed his poems about 3,000 years ago, the noun “bigness” (megathos) refers only to the height of human bodies; the word is still tethered to specific and concrete objects.

Several centuries later, there was a breakthrough when the philosopher Zeno of Elea (c.490-c.430BCE) used “bigness” to mean something like the expanse or dimensionality of all existence: that is, he began to liberate extension from concrete things. Each time the word was stretched, and each advance toward greater abstraction was a tiny victory for poetic genius, and contributed to the richness and power of our language today.