Communication is hard. Period. It really doesn’t help that I’m autistic, and that I struggle with understanding why language is the way that it is. I find myself regularly wishing that telepathic communication was possible, and that there are not enough words to express what, exactly, I mean. I’ve gotten a lot better about this, because a better vocabulary just comes with maturity, but I still feel like making words up is sometimes the only way to describe what I mean… but I don’t do that, because then I wouldn’t be understood.
Language specifically has been on my mind lately. When I take a close look at it, it’s very frustrating. Part of it is just the English language, but most of my complaints regarding language don’t seem to be exclusive to English.
For instance, in a single Word, there is a compromise and a loss of meaning and specificity that is necessary for Communication. What I visualize when I say “Apple” is not going to be the exact same as what you visualize when you hear the word. And we just have to deal with that. Most of the time, it’s fine, and you don’t need to think of the exact apple that I do, but there are infinitely many edge cases where I do need to communicate exactly what that apple is like. Of course, that’s when being verbose/descriptive/specific is useful. But I find the fact that a single word being so loose and ambiguous can make it hard to break down a sentence very frustrating, and it can lead to miscommunication very easily.
Inside every brain are thoughts in a mother tongue spoken by only one person – and to speak and be heard is to go from one private language into a shared code, and then into another private language. The translation is always imperfect. The fact that human beings can communicate at all is sort of amazing. I mean, depending on how evocative I am with language, I can get you pretty close, but ultimately, communication is always settling for good enough.
Innuendo studios, The Artist is Absent: Davey Wreden and The Beginner’s Guide
This is exactly how I feel about language, and exactly why I find it so frustrating. I HATE ambiguity. This is why I type like a pretentious maniac, and why people tell me I’m well-spoken; I have been the cause of miscommunication more times than I can count, and I do everything I can to avoid that. I hate that ambiguity is a feature of language, and large parts of it are designed around ambiguity. And I just have to deal with it.
Again, while my vocabulary is much larger than it used to be, I still find myself unable to communicate certain things that I feel should be communicable. Of course, that’s where “big words” can help. However, sometimes, people interpret such words as pretentious or even hostile, as if I’m talking down to them. It’s a fine balance that I struggle to understand. Be specific for the sake of clarity, or risk sounding pompous?
On top of that, I exist in communities that use a lot of jargon or shorthand terms, and obviously I cannot use them when talking to someone who is unaware of the meaning of the terms. That only makes sense – as described earlier, communication is a collaborative effort – but it’s easy to find yourself unaware of who knows of what term. Using community-specific terms in the presence of people who aren’t aware of them can often come off as talking down to them. I totally get that, that’s valid, and I have felt the same way myself. But it’s nonetheless frustrating when your message just can’t get across because you don’t know what the other person knows. Unfortunately, trying to explain the term’s definition can sound just as pompous and down-talk-y. Case in point:
Personally, I would much rather have an unknown term explained to me than to just go on not understanding what it means. I Google single words all the time. It’s really not a big deal to not know what something means, and it’s okay to ask. I won’t use a word if I don’t know what it actually means, so it’s a good idea to learn what it means. I would think everyone would agree.
Another part of language that I hate is its ability of single words to be manipulated. The same word, even in the same context, can have a very different definition for different people. My go-to example of this is the word “socialism”. The word was designed to describe a (primarily) economic school of thought where laborers own the means of production, but to many people the word describes not an economy, or even an idea, but a governmental system; a fascistic dictatorship. Whether you describe yourself as a socialist or not, the word has been manipulated by years of red scare propaganda. Words can change over time, and that’s okay, but purposeful fearmongering and manipulation from a bad actor is just the sad reality of language.
It’s obviously important that words actually mean the same thing (as much as possible, as it’s always “good enough”) for the people using them. That’s where the books come in, and definitions can be outlined. However, just as words can change, definitions can be outdated. So who’s to decide who updates them? That’s the Descriptivism vs Prescriptivism debate, which is a can of worms all on its own. Essentially, descriptivism is making definitions based on how people use the word (describing), and prescriptivism is assigning (prescribing) a word’s definition based on what is “correct”. The academic consensus regards descriptivism as superior, but personally I think that’s kind of… oversimplified? The armchair intellectuals of the internet have a superiority complex for descriptivism, but, there’s just no way definitions are formed purely through the one method.
For example, let’s say a thousand people think “deep web” means the space where hackers conspire and illegal drugs are sold. Only a hundred people know that “deep web” just means anything that doesn’t show up on search engines (such as your personal banking page or paywalled content), and that the term the prior definition refers to would be “dark web”. From a pure descriptivist’s perspective, people who don’t understand the distinction are the ones who determine the definition, because they are greater in number. That probably sounds like I have a complex about it, and I might be oversimplifying a bit, but both models that form our definitions are important and play a role in the creation of a dictionary, and in my opinion it is ridiculous to call one superior.
My greatest career-related fear is IT customers not being able to communicate what they need, what they want, or what is wrong. Imagine you are told “Your software doesn’t work.” What does that mean? What doesn’t work? Does it crash or freeze up? Does it not save the file? Is there a specific feature that is bugged? Is it just hard to use?
From just being around people in the IT crowd and my own from my education, I get the impression that ambiguity and miscommunication between customers and developers/engineers is a very common problem. And that sucks, and creates a lot of anxiety for me, knowing what I know about myself.
Hell, even just working with Minecraft mods, I see users that create issues on GitHub with just the comment “It crashes” and no further information. This isn’t helpful to anyone, but to be fair to these users often just don’t know how to communicate the issue, and that’s not really their fault. Frankly, a lot of them are children and not savvy. This is why Github Issue Templates are good. But I digress.
This was a bit of a rambly post, but lately I’ve have a whole lot of racing thoughts on this subject, and I needed to write them down. [Also, I edited this post after publishing at least twice.]
Don’t even get me started on body language.
Addendum: Referencing the Dictionary
Some time ago, I witnessed a conversation on Discord where one of the participants brought up the dictionary definition of a word. Another individual was quick to throw their arms up and say “The second you have to reference the dictionary definition of a word, you’ve lost the argument”, and their justification for this was “Prescriptivists don’t determine what words mean, so therefore the dictionary is useless” (obviously I am paraphrasing). I’ve seen a similar attitude all across the sphere of discourse on the Internet, and I’d like to take a second to discuss it.
This attitude is rather silly in my opinion. It’s borne from the superiority complex of descriptivism within the Internet’s armchair intellectual circles. Firstly, if someone feels the need to reference a dictionary, they more than likely feel like there’s a miscommunication, and need a third party (the dictionary) to help facilitate that communication. Referencing the dictionary is useful for communicating, as communication requires an agreement to what words mean. If you can’t at least come to a consensus on that, then communication simply will not work, because, again, it’s a collaborative effort.
Secondly, as far as English is concerned, the mainstream (online) dictionaries of the language are largely descriptivist and progressive. [1][2] When someone contests one of these dictionaries, they are contesting descriptivist academics, not the prescriptivist linguists they are convinced “control” the dictionaries. If you want an actual example of a prescriptivist dictionary and organization, look at the French Academy. These are actual precriptivists that are full of themselves – they literally call themselves “The Immortals”.