The Written Word can be a Dangerous Thing

I've been doing some thinking, reflecting and remembering lately and thought maybe I'd throw it out and see who salutes. Just think of it as me thinking out loud on paper - nothing more

Speaking to one of our local University English professors the other day (yes I live in a college town), I was asking him how I could make people understand what I was trying to write? He said, "You can't! Because the English language is the only language in the world that relies as much on tone and inflection for the meaning as it does the written words. That's why good writers add a lot of colorful and graphic language to try to paint a mental image in the readers mind.

But even this does guarantee the same mental picture from reader to reader". So I asked him, Ok, then how do I choose my words more carefully so that others will know what I am saying? He replied by taking a dictionary down from a nearby shelf and handing it to me and said - "Open it". Which I did as he instructed. He then asked, "Now how many of the words in that dictionary have more than one definition". I replied that I had no idea. To this he said "Most of them. And of those words that have multiple definitions, how many have multiple definitions to are vastly different from each other depending on how it is used? Most of them.

"Now suppose I use one of those words in a sentence. How do I know know which of those definitions you will apply to that word? I don't, because I do not know how you have grown up to use the word, do I? The same word can mean vastly different things to different people.". To this I said - Point made.

In the written English language, it is a wonder we ever get a point made that we all can agree on. There is a basic premise of all communication that all parties in the conversation must have a common language, or else we have no way to communicate. But what if all parties involved had a common language, but poured different meanings into the words? Now if we were using one of the many languages used by other peoples of this world, the written language might be little problem because words commonly have only one meaning and everyone speaking that language knows that meaning when they see a particular word and it means only one thing.

Often words with the same identical spelling are made into words with totally different meanings by the use of little pieces of punctuation that changes the word entirely. But the meaning remains the same from person to person. Now if you take a language that relies on tone, inflection and emphasis for much of its meaning and remove the auditory and visual aspects, you are left with having to insert these on your own in order to apply a meaning to the word or sentence.

Therein lies the problem that leads to so much miscommunication and misunderstanding in the written word. This leads to "I read what it said, therefore it said what I read". But is what you read, what the writer said? When anyone writes, they insert these inflections into their words while writing, either consciously or subconsciously, but we all do it. The problem lies in the fact that these inflections do not carry over to the reader. These inflections are then re-inserted by the reader based on how they interpret what they read and how they have applied the words in their own life and when we do not apply the same inflections and meanings as the writer used, all to often confusion or misunderstandings occur.

Remember this factual truism of all humans - "Perception is reality, and from my reality I shall not be swayed". All to often, this is what results from "I read what it said, therefore it said what I read". This brings to mind an old Johnny Carson show I watched many years ago where Carson was interviewing a foreign book writer (no I do not remember the writers name - what was said is what was most important at the time) doing a book tour in New York for a novel he had written:

Carson - "Now I know it is not unusual for books to be written in other countries and then translated into our language, but you have written this one in the common English language and then translated into yours. Why is that?"

Writer - "In my language, when a reader reads my book - He reads my book and everyone reads the same thing. In your country, when a reader reads my book, they read a library. You see in my country, a word is a word. And everyone reads the same words. In your country, a word is a language, and no two people in your country speak the same language."

A good example of this is:

"I didn't say she was his wife" Silly little line I know, but what did you hear in your mind when you read the words?

[ I ] didn't say she was his wife
I [ didn't ] say she was his wife
I didn't [ say ] she was his wife
I didn't say [ she ] was his wife
I didn't say she [ was ] his wife
I didn't say she was [ his ] wife
I didn't say she was his [ wife ]

Now which line was it that you heard in your mind when you read the line the first time? Read each line emphasizing the word in brackets each time. Does not each line have a different meaning altogether? Yet the words remain the same. Now, which line was the writer saying when he wrote the line originally? You don't know do you just from the written word.

Merely thinking out loud now, I wonder if it might be a good idea to ask for clarification when what we hear in our mind from the words we read do not fit the context of the topic or what we know about the person writing it? Curiosity makes me wonder if this might lead to fewer
misunderstandings and less of "I read what it said, therefore it said what I read".

Just some thoughts out loud - nothing more.

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