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Reader question: In this sentence – When I want to decompress after a stressful day, I want to come home and bake cookies – what does “decompress” mean exactly? My comments: To the speaker, baking cookies is an escape from stressful work during the day. Baking cookies to other people might be a chore – it is a lot of work in itself – but to the speaker, it is a relief. To decompress, you see, is essentially to relax. Decompress is the opposite of compress, which means to press and squeeze, i.e. to increase the pressure and therefore reduce something to a smaller size. Computer people, for example, talk of compressing and decompressing files, i.e. changing large files into a smaller format and vice versa. Or, have you ever used a pressure cooker? That’s another good example right there in the kitchen. Unlike normal cookers, the pressure cooker is air tight. Being air tight, it is able to retain more hot air as the water in the cooker boils and evaporates. Increasing amount of vapor means increased pressure in the cooker (hence the term pressure cooker) which in consequence makes hard-to-boil meats easy to cook. After the meats are cooked, you open the little hole on top of the lid to gradually release the air inside, for it to decompress, i.e. to drop in pressure, before you can open the lid altogether. Well, people work so hard that they sometimes describe their work places as pressure-cooker situations. | 
