We speak. We write. We create works of art. All the while, we try to have confidence that the effects we intended will register with audiences. If it were only so.
In theory, communication looks so straightforward. When we address others we pass on what we assume are clear ideas with unambiguous meanings. We want to have confidence that the effects we intended will actually register.
Its not so easy. Shared meaning as a requisite of clear understanding is harder to achieve than we imagine. It turns out that we aren’t very good at transferring even simple information or individual preferences to others. Consider a simple case. A Huffington Post reporter noted that a Spanish language version of the President’s recent State of the Union Address missed a lot. In one case, where Obama used the phrase “I couldn’t be prouder of them,” the Spanish translation was, more or less, “I couldn’t feel masses proud of it.” It was a simple mistake, but anyone converting one language to another knows that perfect equivalency is illusive. All communication is translation. Even when the language remains the same, there is always an interpretive function which requires that the words pass through the filter of our experiences.
This doesn’t mean that we are always in a solipsistic fog. Some statements are relatively obvious and can produce a quick consensus. “Turn right” is not a vague command, but it can be ambiguous if the sender and receiver are facing each other. Similarly, statements like “He failed algebra in high school” or “She dislikes liver and onions” are mostly concrete and stipulative: two features shared with most kinds of mathematical statements. In math, common agreement about basic terms leaves little room for confusion. Yet, even moving to the slightly more complex task of naming simple objects can be problematic, especially if it’s the case that my idea of a “camera” is one that uses film and yours is the digital device in your phone.
These simple challenges with individual words are heightened when we scale up to the meanings of cultural products like a speeches, songs or movies. At this level the hope for uniformity of meaning pretty much goes out the window. For example, ask someone what songs on their music player, and you will get a list of favorites that are likely to be more personal than communal. What means so much to one enthusiast is often unlistenable to another. Young adults are especially tuned to hit the scorn button when they hear the favorites of older family members. I can still see my parents brace themselves for the inevitable taunt if I passed nearby when they were listening to completely uncool music. Similarly, in the presence of my favorites our children return the favor with polite silence. (Who could not love jazz played on steel drums?)
Finding widespread agreement on the significance of films is even harder. Many of us find it difficult to predict what a friend or family member will like. What seems so insightful to us can make no sense to others. Seeing someone’s growing puzzlement as you rhapsodize about a terrific performance can make the idea of “shared meaning” seem like an oxymoron.
The villain here is not just the tricky business of producing concurrent meaning. There is also an additional problem in the specific word that we often use when someone surprises us by their unexpected reaction to an apparently clear message. We often say that they didn’t get it: that they “misunderstood.” But notice what “misunderstood” implies about perspective. It suggests that the initial communicator gets to be the arbiter in deciding the authentic translation of an idea or thought. That sometimes makes sense. After all, it usually is their thought. But as an idea with a pretense to truth-testing, the judgment embedded in the word converts what is often a simple difference into an error. “Misunderstood” gives one side a free pass by putting the burden of a “mistake” on the other.
All of this should serve as simple reminder that meaning is naturally variable. Thankfully, dictionaries usually don’t get to have the last word. We are entitled to apply our experience to what we know and like. That we can’t predict with certainty how a person will receive our rhetoric is evidence that we have sensibilities which are different, but not necessarily deficient.
Some of us are waterfalls of language. But we can be too sure that a constant flow of dazzling fluency will solidify our relations with others.
I had a friend who had an aversion to people who constantly filled a room with talk. It was probably the eastern mystic in Paul, who was constantly chagrined by people who had dedicated themselves to replacing whatever silence they encountered with their own observations. I never asked him why he recoiled from these conversational marathoners. But I think I knew. He favored words chosen carefully. He liked comments that had a point, but not ten points. Most of all, he recoiled against Very Verbal People who turned their opinions into a circus of logorrhea. Speaking before fully processing what you wanted to communicate wasn’t his style. Not surprisingly, his care with words and comfort with silence made him a wonderful listener and a good colleague.
Even so, there are times when we do love verbal people who light up a space with their wit and responsiveness. For most of us that room is usually a theater. It helps when we can witness a conversation that has been worked out and honed by a room full of crack writers. It helps as well to have actors who can deliver the perfect response with a naturalness that lets us forget that their words came from a script.
The performer as a Very Verbal Person is something of a showcase for the possibilities of language, a model that we may admire for putting a difficult person in their place or, better yet, restoring the will of someone damaged by the worst that life can give. A good script perfects what is never quite so clear in real life.
My favorite cases include the Schlegel sisters in James Ivory’s 1992 film, Howard’s End. E. M. Forster’s two young women are confined by the conventions of the day to stay close to their modest home in turn of the century London. But they are full of ideas and thirsty for conversation, even if the potential conversant is simply a clerk who shows up at their front door to retrieve a misappropriated umbrella. Their curiosity makes them seem fully alive.
There is also the pleasure of hearing the complex overlapping dialogue of a Robert Altman film, especially his classic M.A.S.H (1970). Its the same satisfaction a viewer gets from vastly different television classics like WB’s Gilmore Girls (2000) or The West Wing (1999). Writer Aaron Sorkin’s breakthrough series about the Bartlet administration is defined by Sorkin’s love of dialogue structured as a series of intense interrogatories and responses. No voiceless and moody reaction shots here, which is supposedly the stuff of television. In Sorkin’s world characters are always duty bound to frame their feelings as complete counter-arguments.
The surprise in the otherwise more conventional Gilmore Girls lies partly in the fact that the actors were running through scripts that were often twice the number of pages as similar hour-long shows. Indeed, the long-running series now in re-runs owes its best scenes to the rhythm and pacing common in 1930’s film farces. Who knew that Lauren Graham would be an heir to the traditions of the Marx Brothers, Cary Grant, and Rosalind Russell?
In these and other entertainments the fun is in watching Very Verbal People trade rebukes and put-downs using a logic entirely their own. The point obviously was not the real-world relevance of the logic, which only makes sense within the manufactured world of the narrative, but the pleasure of seeing people completely comfortable with the task of explaining any and everything.
And so it goes for Irene Dunn and Cary Grant, playing a couple who have drifted into a split in Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937). The pair have talked their way into a divorce that neither wants:
Jerry: In a half an hour, we'll no longer be Mr. and Mrs. Funny, isn't it.
Lucy: Yes, it's funny that everything's the way it is on account of the way you feel.
Jerry: Huh?
Lucy: Well, I mean, if you didn't feel that way you do, things wouldn't be the way they are, would they? I mean, things could be the same if things were different.
Jerry: But things are the way you made them.
Lucy: Oh, no. No, things are the way you think I made them. I didn't make them that way at all. Things are just the same as they always were, only, you're the same as you were, too, so I guess things will never be the same again.
All of this boils down to our love of the idea of total fluency. We spend a lot of our waking hours trying to imagine the right thing. . .anything. . .that will resolve the challenges of dealing with prickly others. Its only natural to admire the Very Verbal People who make it look so easy.
