Easy, Intuitive and Metaphor, and other meaningless words - 12 December 2007

What is easy? I find many things easy; making tea, speaking English, driving. I also find many things hard; speaking Spanish, understanding modern art (which I privately suspect is because there isn’t much to understand) and keeping my desk tidy. Is this because these things are inherently easy or hard? Or is more about me and my specific abilities, or lack of them? After all, speaking Spanish can’t be that hard, almost 400 million people around the world seem to manage it effortlessly, (just as I do speaking my native language, English).