UNDERSTANDING, n.
We sometimes feel that we have been really understood, but it was always long ago, by someone now dead.
--Mignon McLaughlin
UNDERSTANDING, n.
A cerebral secretion that enables one having it to know a house from a horse by the roof on the house. Its nature and laws have been exhaustively expounded by Locke, who rode a house, and Kant, who lived in a horse.
His understanding was so keen That all things which he'd felt, heard, seen, He could interpret without fail If he was in or out of jail. He wrote at Inspiration's call Deep disquisitions on them all, Then, pent at last in an asylum, Performed the service to compile 'em. So great a writer, all men swore, They never had not read before.
Jorrock Wormley
--Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary