I refer to this as “giving a concept a handle.” We have the familiar idea of mapping words to concepts, but the process of mapping a more complex concept to a useful (intersection of evocative and memorable) “handle phrase” is a lot fuzzier. Also related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in that it is more difficult to think about things that are hard to communicate succinctly.
I refer to this as “giving a concept a handle.” We have the familiar idea of mapping words to concepts, but the process of mapping a more complex concept to a useful (intersection of evocative and memorable) “handle phrase” is a lot fuzzier. Also related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in that it is more difficult to think about things that are hard to communicate succinctly.