laymens terms for netstat states

Applications IP Networking
1

Ok, I've read the manpages on netstat and it gives a good description of the state values such as CLOSE_WAIT, ESTABLISHED, SYN_RECEIVED, etc..
Can someone give me real world situations where you would get these states. LIke for example if I got SYN_RECEIVED what possible situations would be the reason i got this

Please help, any info given would be much appreciated
thanks in advance

2

Two I can think of...

One: A valid request from one system to yours for a connection.

Two: A SYN attack - if you have multiple request that don't seem to stop and increase in number, then you might be under attack.
See WINNT Library for a further explaination.