I didn't have the word for it in my boyhood, or it wasn't central, we might call an "SAT word", but now I do, and would say my Grandma Esther (dad's mom), was a polymath.
Her reading and conversation, often about what she was reading, was highly eclectic. She displayed a deep interest in whatever topic she was diving into, which I might translate as "a high degree of comprehension" because, again with the passage of time, I've become enamored of the word "comprehensivist", championed by CJ (Chris Fearnley), as a quasi-synonym for "polymath".
In some passages I value, I've seen "comprehension" and "apprehension" interlinked in ways I appreciate.
Comprehension is a vital phase in that apprehension is more a lotta dots without connections and therefore no ability to squeeze, shrink down, compress. Information balloons, outta control. Why were "witch doctors" or "logicians of the psyche" (i.e. psychologists) dubbed "shrinks" in beatnik slang (the same slang that gave us "squares")?
The common wisdom is "shrink is a derogatory reference to shrunken heads, again satirizing a profession in suggesting its more of a pseudoscience than a fully generalized anything (a real, or hard, science).
But why not admit another meaning: "to shrink" is to hand back to the customer a simplified model of a dynamic (a diorama of the ego-hero's predicament, customized) wherein the essentials are highlighted and extranea made to retreat into the background. Something big, humongous, and overwhelming, is now more minute and therefore manageable.
To shrink is to comprehend, and thereby make short work of.
In this blog, we link Polymathy to Wandering. Being a stumblebum among disciplines doesn't imply ricocheting to no purpose, but rather with an eye to shrinking down, make comprehension (attained through processing) the goal of apprehension (collecting data).
Wandering may be envisioned as a stationary activity in the case of meditating (perhaps upon a pile of pillows) and/or thinking and/or pondering (considering). But a wanderer is usually more adequately portrayed as someone actively engaged in epistemic foraging within a surrounding environment, exercising a wider range of skills and/or ways of coping. The "learning curve" is multi-dimensional.
