The best way to get a good grasp of all of the possible meanings is to get as much information as you can about each thing, particularly the history behind each. And you constantly want to keep asking yourself why, what and how. Let's go back to the sample list. Most people in a panic situation stomp on the brakes very hard and lock up the wheels and this just makes things worse. Since it is almost impossible to remember to pump the brakes in an emergency, the engineers decided to figure out a way for the car itself to pump the brakes and eliminate locking up the wheels.
Canaries are little yellow birds that sing often and have been kept in cages as pets for centuries.
They discovered that canaries are very sensitive to methane and keel over when they get even the slightest whiff of the stuff. One of the great dangers in any coal mine is an explosion from tunneling into pockets of methane. The danger was particularly acute when miners used carbide lamps with open flames. So miners took canaries into the mines as gas detectors. If the bird began to act strangely, everyone headed for the exits, kind of like an early version of the smoke detector.