The only constrained anticipation I have for 'insulin' is that it helps diabetic people - although I now note that I have no real idea what 'diabetic people' means in medical terms or how, if I were thrust back in time, I would be able to reliably identify them.

I suggest that t-shirt is not a compressed guide, it's a memory aid for people who already know the details behind it and who could, if their memory was entirely under their command, manage exactly the same without it.

But these terms don't exist in complete isolation. Say for example I'm sent back to 1850. Then I don't know what the different parts of a pancreas look like, but doctors will know. So I can bootstrap my knowledge based on that (and presumably they know what a diabetic is and how to recognize them). Some of these (like using quartz crystals to make clocks) are difficult due to infrastructural problems, but most of them have large amounts of associated ideas that connect to the terms.

By analogy with the issue being discussed, the terms being used don't function completely as detached levers, since when we have a written record of you saying "I like to eat apples but not oranges" we have a specific idea of what "apple" means.