Why We Don’t Say What We Mean

January 20, 2022 | By Serena Puang DC ‘22+1

image description: three corded phones against a white background. Two of the phones are connected to each other– united, but unable to communicate.

This piece was written at the Veritas Forum 2021, an annual writing program offered by the Augustine Collective. Students from various universities work with writing coaches to write articles about virtue in the sciences or social sciences.

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I grew up in Arkansas, but for most of the last eight months, I’ve lived with my aunt and grandma in Taiwan. This lent itself to more than a few moments of culture shock and miscommunication. For the first two months, I felt like no one at church or in my ballroom dancing club wanted to be my friend. I would say hi and try to make conversation, but it always felt one sided. 

These interactions led me to conclude that Taiwanese people, in general, were not friendly. After all, if a new person had showed up at my church/school/club meeting, I would never treat them that way. Was there something wrong with me? What was I doing that was putting people off? 

Words mean different things to different people. As a linguistics major, I know that intellectually, but I don’t always start conversations with that premise in mind. It’s easy to assume that since my conversation partner and I are both speaking the same language, the words we use mean the same things. A red apple is a red apple. It’s simple.

Except, it’s not. 

When I confided in my cousin, who grew up in Taiwan, she disagreed with my premise. 

“I think people are friendly, just not proactive.” she said. Hadn’t I noticed how polite people were when I asked for help? And most Taiwanese people I talked to about this agreed with her. 

But to me, being friendly is being proactive. As the conversation went on, I realized that the “friendly” she described was more like the lack of harm or malice--a disposition toward support and politeness which doesn’t require actualization. This was completely unrecognizable to me as friendliness. I think being friendly requires initiating action, behaving in ways which would communicate that we are friends even if our relationship status hasn’t quite caught up yet.

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Words come with baggage. We all have different cultural and personal experiences which influence the way we perceive and experience words. When it comes to certain words, like names, this is clear--even when we compare with our past selves. The pet name that only your ex used to call you likely elicits different emotions now than it did back when you were in that relationship. 

Some semantic differences are benign and easily resolved. If in the middle of a conversation, I find out that your perception of the word “interview” leads you to believe that I’m going to answer questions to try to get a job instead of asking someone else questions in the name of  journalism, I can say so, and we can laugh it off. 

But what about the words we assume do mean the same things in context? 

We don’t see the same colors, as evidenced in 2015 when the internet could not agree if the now infamous dress was white and gold or blue and black. For me, and 2-5% of the population with aphantasia, “metaphors” do not evoke images. In schools, students have vastly different ideas of what it means to be “broke” or “failing” which depend on baselines established by their backgrounds.

There are situations in which having different definitions and not realizing it can cause significant conflict and even social problems. When this happens between patients and doctors, it can lead to misdiagnosis or the patient not feeling understood and not adhering to treatment. In the last year, Americans have been wrestling with questions that involve, among other things, racism, safety, and acceptable risks. When we come to the table with different definitions of key terms, we can talk endlessly around issues and never agree on the heart of the problem, or more importantly, never do anything about them.  

When asked, people can cobble together a cloud of meaning in the form of associations for words like “science” or “equality” or “freedom.” But the definitions they give are not necessarily the premises they’re operating off of. Which means, even if you ask, you might not get to the root of the problem. 

“We don't even always have a clear idea of what we mean or what we're saying.” explained Renee Edwards, professor of interpersonal communication at Louisiana State University. “We just have a general thought, and we find the words that express that thought. But we don't always have a precise meaning to go along with it. I think we speak in generalities.”

With all these differences and complicating factors, it’s almost a wonder to think that any communication happens at all. Communication is fundamental to our life as humans. It’s cliche advice to tell someone that the way out of their problem is to talk it out, and with preexisting relationships, like the one I had with my cousin, it can be important to do so. When we carry different definitions of words, it’s easy to assume bad intentions, as I did with my new friends in Taiwan and having conversations which can reset expectations helps. 

But these miscommunications are a symptom of a larger problem we have to wrestle with in every interaction. We are constantly negotiating the terms and conditions in which we talk with people that go beyond their semantic associations. As a nation, when we talk about important issues like abortion, vaccinations, same sex marriage, or Critical Race Theory, we often don’t mean the same things when we say words. Our words are charged with the personal experiences, values, and culture which brought us to those conclusions. Fundamentally, the problem isn’t that we have different definitions of words, it’s that we assume we have the same ones. In a country with increasing divisiveness and people burrowing deeper into their political echo chambers, we don’t know what we don’t know.

Having conversations across the aisle could be helpful, but as anyone who’s tried to have a political discussion online knows, this is not always the case.

“If your goal is to try to persuade them of your rightness and their wrongness. Then you shouldn't pursue it,” said Edwards. “More communication is not necessarily better.” 

“You can talk with someone all day long, and you may never come to agreement or a common understanding,” she said. 

Instead, she continued, people should try to find points of common ground and build relationships. “I think sometimes we just have to accept differences, acknowledge them, and move on to something else.”

In practice, that’s difficult to do, and I wonder if that’s even possible for the big misunderstandings. But that’s what I ended up doing during the rest of my time in Taiwan. My definitions of words like “loud” or “skinny” or “polite” weren’t the same as those around me, and those differences caused tension...even when I knew that we were experiencing cultural and semantic differences. 

But in trying to see it from other people’s points of view and intentionally not taking the way I see the world for granted, I found respite from the frustrations I felt in my first months there. The circumstances didn’t change, I changed to fit into them. While I can’t say that I find the Taiwanese definition of friendliness preferable, I left Taiwan after saying goodbye to local people I’d consider friends, and in that, I guess we bridged the gap after all.