Your vault is a graph, but you navigate it through words. When I type [[ in Obsidian, whatever comes to mind in that instant determines what gets linked — and whatever doesn’t come to mind simply stays disconnected. If I once called something “information overload” and later called the same idea “consumption trap,” those two notes never meet; the thought is split across two names that never reach for each other. The API is broken. Consistent vocabulary, then, is consistent wiring — the human equivalent of a stable API contract: rename the endpoint and all the clients break.
But a rich vocabulary does more than help retrieval — it shapes what you can think in the first place. If you have precise words for subtle distinctions, you can hold those distinctions in mind and reason about them; if you don’t, they blur into a single undifferentiated lump. A programmer who only knows “list” cannot think in “stack” versus “queue” versus “deque,” and so cannot reach for the structure each problem actually wants. The same principle governs personal knowledge: the richer and more precise your naming, the more dimensions you have to think in — and the more of your own graph you can actually traverse. (A distinction I first sharpened reading a note from a friend.)