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| A wordless message |
Let’s be honest. We all want to connect and communicate with other people. Maybe not all other people, but at least selected other people, whether we select them to be a friend or a mate, we want them to select us to be an employee, or the selection is organic as parents and children.
To be honest, we cannot connect with other people unless we can communicate, and our principal means of communication is words. Sure, simply existing in the flesh communicates something, being visible and audible and tangible. Gestures and actions communicate effectively, as well. But most of the work of interaction is done using words.
Words can be both spoken and written, heard and read. Words can travel farther and faster than our full fleshy selves, both across a table and across the country. Words can be saved up until someone has time to hear or see them in a sound recording or in a notebook. More than simply handy, words are essential to communication.
Words can fail us, not simply when we lack the right words, but when the words provided are unintelligible to the intended recipient because of garbled transmission or bad handwriting. Most vexing is when the speaker and the listener do not share the same words, that is, they speak and understand in different languages. Translating, though possible, is a tricky business, something always being lost in it – as the saying goes.
When words fail, what we have is a failure to communicate. Where there is the desire or even the need to communicate, the failure of words is an obstacle that can prevent or destroy a relationship.
But an honest evaluation would lead most of us to admit that we do not think much nor long about most of the words involved in our communication. The words we send out when we speak or write, and the many, many more words sent toward us by others, flow at such a rapid rate that we rarely pause to consider what would be precisely the right word to speak, or to wonder which of several possible meanings we should take with a word that we hear or read. The words that we speak and hear are almost always unexamined.
Do all the words we speak mean the same thing to us as they do to the people we intend to receive them? Do all the words we hear mean the same thing to us as they do to person who sends them our way? We like to think they do; imagine how unsettling it would be to have to assume that they did not! Is it possible to choose and use words in such a way that our meaning is obscured or confused? Is it possible to hear words in a way that gives them a meaning completely alien from the meaning intended by the speaker? It clearly is possible, and we all know it, but we do not let it hamper us.
We know this divergence that undermines communication is possible, but we keep on speaking and listening as if we have some grounds for confidence that this divergence is not going to happen to us, not in this conversation, and that our interlocutor has the same confidence. That’s a lot to take for granted while not weighing the words that fly back and forth at an astounding rate in almost all our communication.
Though I have been considering the content of my message for several days now, I am typing the specific words relatively quickly without hovering over this or that word choice. The indicator at the bottom of the screen tells me I surpassed six hundred words. The quantity is not itself my goal, though it does emphasize how many of these marvelous little language units are required to accomplish a modest task.
Clearly, I am confident that the words I type today will be read or received by you, dear reader, in a manner that will move the meaning I have in my mind to an understanding you have in your mind. The tool of this transfer of thought and knowledge is language, the assembly and deployment of words. Until we examine not only what a word means but even what a word is, we have to ask ourselves: can we be honest?
Monsignor Smith
