An Introduction to "Cepts"

Before I had heard the term 'meme', I came up with the idea of 'cepts' - an abbreviation of 'concept'. A meme is a 'cultural unit', a bit of common wisdom, a tale, a slogan... anything that has inserted itself into mass common sense. At first, I thought the accepted 'meme' replaced my invented 'cept' entirely, but it does not. While the two ideas are related, cepts are much more granular.

A cept is a nugget of thought. Our brains are fantastic summarizing machines. We take complex ideas and give them simple labels in order to piece them together with other ideas and summarize them further. When we don't have a single word for a cept, we use a phrase.

The identification, labeling and cataloging of cepts is an important part of the conversation engine.

Cepts are single words or phrases that encapsulate a thought.

"Apple" is a cept, but so is "isn't that special?"

The following are single cepts:
"That's a good point"
"If you want"
"not a problem"
"thank you"
"no, thank you"
"how did you do that?"
"did you do that"
"what are you doing?"

Cepts are chunks of sentences that we assemble like tinkertoys to communicate.

The sentence "Where is the hotel?"
Has at least two cepts.

"Where is" and "the hotel"

I say 'at least two' because there may be an overlapping cept "where is the" and a single word cept "hotel"

Words used in cepts can be used in other cepts.
"Where is the" and "Where's the" are two cepts that represent the same thing: An interrogative begging a response with location cepts, lack of knowledge cepts or assistance to gain this information cepts.

Interesting point -- cepts are used to establish context and narrow the scope of conversation.