Understanding Each other

Misunderstandings abound.  Some are trivial; some are significant. We recognize many of them right away, but some take years to recognize, if we ever recognize them at all.  Those that are significant and that are recognized later rather than sooner, are often devastating in ways they would not have been had they been recognized right away.

There are reasons for so many misunderstandings.  And sometimes it is amazing that there is actually as much understanding as there is, and that we can understand each other at all.  It is actually a complex process to take a perception or idea you have in your mind and translate it into words in such a way that another person can use those words to form the same perception or idea or to recognize what your perception or idea really is. 

It is easy to see this if you think about trying to describe in words something like the taste of an unusual or uncommon spice.  You generally need to simply let the other person taste it too.  It is real clear how it tastes to you, but that clarity cannot normally be put into words. 

It is also easy to see when you go about trying to teach someone something that seems relatively clear and simple to you, but you discover that trying to say it in words takes pages and pages you didn’t expect. And often the relationship between the paragraphs or statements in those pages is complex and complicated in a way that surprises us, since the relationships they describe are clear and simple in our minds.   Our ideas, I believe, are not necessarily verbal, but conceptual in some way that itself defies description, as when people say “I know how to do this; I just don’t know how to explain or describe it in words.”

But the problem exists in simpler and more openly observable, tangible, descriptive cases too.  When I was a senior in high school our rather eccentric English teacher once in a while gave an “A or F” test, where one mistake earned you an F.  If she hadn’t been just lovably crazy, and if the F’s had not counted for as little as they did, that would have bothered us all, but the announcement of these tests mainly brought about more of a collective “what crazy thing now?” groan with an anticipation this was going to be so screwy it would probably be hilarious some day.  So on this one day, she sprang one of her “A or F” tests: the boys had to write how to tie a tie; the girls, how to tie a bow.  Right away, the boys who at that time only ever wore “clip on” ties when they wore a tie at all, knew they were dead.  But the rest of us had hope which turned out to be false.  We wrote our essays, and the next day the grading began, using the following process. She had brought in a tie and she had brought in some ribbon.  She selected  volunteers to stand up in front of the class as she read out the instructions each of us had written.  The volunteer was to follow the instructions precisely as she read them.  If at the end of the instructions, the tie was tied in what looked like an appropriate tie knot, or the ribbon was tied in an appropriate bow, the writer of that paper received an A, otherwise an F.  There were not many, if any, A’s.

My particular failure particularly exasperated me.  I liked wearing a full (or “double”) Windsor knot, which is more intricate to tie than a “four in hand” knot, and I was intent on showing off how to tie that.  So I did.  And I wrote it clearly enough that I should have received an A, since the knot the volunteer tied, as you will see, was a Windsor.  But the tie she had come in with for these trials was some tie made out of material thick enough to have been a blanket some really very thick and also unbelievably wide, relatively short, twenty or thirty year out of date, tie.  When the volunteer finished tying a double Windsor in that tie, he ended up with a knot the size and shape of a baseball (even though it was actually tied correctly in a double Windsor) and no tie “flaps” at all hanging down from the knot because all the material was in the knot itself.  “F!”  This was in the day of thin, narrow ties, and I protested the grading procedure was unfair because she had used such a thick and wide tie and it should have been a modern, normal tie.  She replied “Then you should have said that, and you didn’t. F!”  Foiled again. Nuts! And, of course, I hadn’t said that because it never for a moment occurred to me she would have brought in some tie like that, or even that there were ties like that.  It was something of the reverse of the scene in the Crocodile Dundee movie where the street punk pulls a knife on Dundee and demands to be given his money, and Dundee says “Why should I give you my money?” And the punk says “Because I have a knife.”  And Dundee says “That is not a knife” as he pulls out and shows the kid his huge Australian hunting knife and says “This is a knife.”  If that movie had been available when I was in high school, I could have said “That is not a tie; this is a tie.”  It would have been funny in light of the movie scene, but I still would have got an F, because she would not have “bought it”.

 Now, in part misunderstandings occur because language is imprecise and it is not always easy to explain to someone else an idea or feeling you have.  In this regard, it is often interesting to  come across a foreign word or phrase that perfectly expresses a feeling or idea you may have had that you previously couldn’t figure out how to describe, showing that the limitation wasn’t so much yours as it was the words and range of expressions you had available in your own language.   When you try to explain the idea or feeling you have in mind using your own language, people can easily misunderstand it.

 For example, in American culture as of this writing, the fashion is for women to be thought to look attractive and desirable, they should be slender and fit; anything else is considered to be fat, while to be more overweight than just fat is described as obese, and beyond that descriptions go into “big, fat” or “grossly obese”, etc. However, despite the efforts of Hollywood or Madison Avenue to convince us otherwise, many men find most appealing in terms simply of external appearance women somewhere in between “hardbodied” or slim on the one hand and “fat” or “obese” on the other.  In English the words we have to express that shape we like, a shape, which, for example, Marilyn Monroe had, might be “voluptuous” or “a woman with some meat on her bones”.But “voluptuous” has a connotation of being desirable because large breasted (unless we are talking about “voluptuous lips”) and “having some meat on her bones” tends to convey that anything less is scrawny, which is not necessarily true, and can also apply to a person’s being muscular or “substantial” or big and heavy in some sense that does not necessarily convey desirability.  Yiddish, however, has a word that, in the right context and tone of voice conveys the idea perfectly ZAFTIG (the first syllable rhyming, fittingly enough, with “soft”).  This means something like “pleasingly plump” (though that still does not convey the desirability of it and still has something of a negative connotation) or the phrase I heard once that I liked: “built for comfort, not for speed”. A zaftig woman is “ample” in a soft and pleasing, most desirable way to snuggle up against or to press against in a romantic embrace.   But saying in English that a woman is “ample” or “pleasingly plump” or “has some meat on her bones” does not convey the idea that zaftig does.

 In part, misunderstandings also occur sometimes because the subject matter is not sufficiently narrowed down in a specific passage or conversation for the audience or listener.  The easiest example of this sort of thing is in a conversation where someone is relating a story about two women and starts out a sentence with the pronoun “she”, and the listener doesn’t know to which woman that refers.  But it happens in much less obvious ways too that make a statement seem false, rather than simply unclear or ambiguous. For example, in some of my writings about schools and education, I have in mind suburban middle and upper middle class schools.  While many of the ideas also will apply to urban or rural schools with less money and which have students with different background experiences and knowledge, often they apply just to relatively affluent suburban types of  schools.  If I don’t specifically point that out, invariably someone will correctly say it is not true of a school in a blighted urban environment, and I have to go back and qualify my comment, which then sounds like I am trying to hedge or that I didn’t know what I was talking about.  This kind of error is just like the error of not specifying the “test tie” above should be a relatively long, narrow, thin, modern tie.  I knew what I had in mind but didn’t think (I had) to say that.