My mother found both my doormat and my door plaque at garage sales. The doormat says “GO AWAY” and the plaque says “Mental Ward.”

(Total side note: Is wordpress still violently opposed to email/name comments? I think I have 3 or 4 wordpress logins depending on usage and can never remember which email address goes to which name.)

The main issue with using words (either written or spoken) to convey ideas is that ideas are NOT language. Sure, you can try to use language to convey and describe these amazing ideas and adventures and epiphanies, but ideas are NOT language themselves. So we must encode our ideas into language in order to send the ideas to someone else.

Once sent, we have to hope and pray that the ideas we’ve sent out will be DECODED by people in the *same way* we ENCODED them in the first place, in order for our idea to be properly understood.

Unfortunately, there is a problem in this method of idea-sharing: no one, not a single person, has the exact same background, upbringing, understanding and experiences as anyone else.

As such, no one will ever always decode your ideas in the exact way you always intend them to do so.

Example: My brother once called me up while he was at a bar. He was quite drunk. “Sister,” he asked me, “who were those monsters on Fraggle Rock?”

“What, the Gorgs?” I replied, perplexed.

“THE GORGS. YES. THANK YOU. AWESOME.”

Since my brother and I had shared similar (though obviously not identical) experiences while growing up, we both grew up watching Fraggle Rock, with the Fraggles, Doozers and Gorgs. But without that shared Fraggle Rock experience, I wouldn’t have known what the hell he was talking about.

As another example, let’s look at WoW. Playing WoW introduces a whole new series of words and meanings behind those words (and acronyms). If I said to a friend of mine, who did not play WoW, “Man, my tank was such a noob the other day in DM North on the Tribute Run,” that person would get NOTHING of what I meant in that phrase, whereas you, a long-time WoW player, would completely understand and, more than that, you would probably be able to commiserate with me.

My point in all of this is that using ANY language to convey ideas to others, be it spoken or written, English or French or Russian, there is always a good chance of miscommunication and misunderstanding. Always. Even if you’re generally on the same page, there will never be a moment when you are absolutely guaranteed that someone will ALWAYS get exactly what you’re saying. Even in WoW — I called the Balnazzar part of Stratholme “Strat Live” in Vanilla, but I met people who called it “Scarlet Strat” or “Strat Red”.

The only real solution to this kind of potential misunderstanding or miscommunication is to do exactly as you said: think before you speak. Consider the possible misinterpretations of what you’re about to say/write and do what you can to minimize those misinterpretations by editing the text appropriately.

And that concludes today’s lesson in communications studies. (Stuart Hall is the theorist I basically borrowed from. Fascinating stuff.)