The Word is Not Enough

Words aren’t neat signals, decoded at the end. They’re just clues in a game — a game that leaders need to know.

Here’s something we managers don’t do enough: ask someone to “play back” what you said to them, or wrote to them. But not like challenging them with a quiz. More a check of mutual comprehension. In fact, the one who feels challenged will likely be yourself:

Hear back what the person heard, and you may not recognize it. There will be some echoes of what you wrote or said.

But there’ll be riffs, extensions, places you never saw your ideas going. And other new ideas grafted on.

One thing you can do is say “great, more ideas!” But you might also worry about what’s been lost from your message. Misunderstood, or plain missed. Didn’t they receive it correctly? Is something wrong with their communication apparatus?

Well no. I said last month that language isn’t signals, we’re not transmitters, and our audience aren’t receivers. Language isn’t an exchange of codes. Let me say it straight:

The sounds or writing we produce have no meaning except what we and our audience hang on them.

“Hang on yourself!” you might say. “Words have meanings – that’s what dictionaries are for!”

It’s true that dictionaries list meanings, but:

1. They didn’t create the meanings.

2. They don’t cover all the meanings.

3. They struggle to keep up with changing meanings.

The meanings of words really live in the space between people. We are social animals, so we use words in similar ways. But ultimately there is no fixed meaning to a word, only the range of things that it’s used for across countless human interactions.

It’s like a game, where:

Does this sound like fluffy social science? Why does it matter anyway?

It matters because our belief in “language as a code” messes up our communication. It makes us more frustrated when we can’t get through (like teams and bosses failing to understand us). And it can hold us back from communicating better.

By breaking our false picture of how communication works, we can build a new one, one that helps us deal with the traps and possibilities of language.

But breaking a mental model is hard. We certainly need more than neat statements that are hard to prove or disprove. We need to zoom in and see the way that language really works. Here are the disconcerting details.

Words seem solid. “In the beginning was the Word” is how John started his gospel (at least in the King James translation). “The Word” signified godly logic and order.

Sentences may wobble under grammar rules, but a single word is a solid chunk. And if you don’t know a word, you can look it up.

So let’s do that. Let’s look some words up. Something simple and physical first — like “door”.

This image, to be clear, shows a door. It’s a kind of flat panel, usually on a hinge. When you “open the door”, the panel moves, to unblock the space that it filled.

But what about when you “walk through the door”? You are not smashing your way through the panel. The panel is already “open”, showing the “doorway”, which is the thing you actually walk through.

But it’s easier to say “walk through the door”. And so, the meaning of “door” depends on where you use it. It changes with the context.

What about something even more solid, the thing we stand on, the “ground”? Surely that word means one thing only? The entry in the dictionary starts with the ground we stand on, the surface of the earth. Further down, it also digs into the ground. But that's close enough. It stays where it belongs, under our feet.

How about — “a cricket ground”? To be sure, this kind of “ground” is more than the surface of the earth or the soil below it. But you have to play cricket somewhere, not in the air, not in the sea, so let’s call this meaning close enough.

Just remember that this “cricket ground” may have a pavilion in it (not meaning inside of the earth, but next to the earth and grass where people play cricket, and part of the big area that belongs to the owners of the place where people play cricket). You know that. The dictionary doesn’t quite spell it out but we know that, right? Well — unless we aren’t from a cricketing country, or haven’t learned “pavilion”. Perhaps we need a little context to understand some meanings of “ground”.

But it gets messier. There are metaphorical meanings of “ground”, such as “the blog post covered too much ground”. Those metaphors aren’t hard to understand, but they shift the context. From the basic meaning, more meanings sprout. We could say that those meanings grow from the ground up, although they have not been “ground up” in some grinder or blender. No-one has put those meanings in a mill. Not like ground almonds or ground bass. Oh wait, that last one’s a different context again.

As we walk down the dictionary page, the complexity of our not-so-simple ground continues. I’m afraid that grounds can also verb. A bird can ground a plane, and a therapist may ground your experience. Don’t know much about Western therapy? You’re a bit stuck without that context.

All in, “ground” currently has:

• 8 major noun senses

• 6 major verb senses

• An adjectival sense

• A few set phrases to boot.

Is that it? These meanings compiled, can the dictionary-builder call the word done, and move on to something new?

Going by history, no. The ancestor of the word “ground” meant “a permanent house”! The meaning of the word has not just grown but moved sideways. There is no permanent central meaning to the word. The ground is shifting.

Let’s try once more to find a word whose external definition we can rely on. How about a building block of grammar? Grammatical words such as pronouns and articles are often more stable than the lexical words: nouns, verbs, adjectives.

For real solidity, how about a Germanic word rather than more modern Latin? The word “those” has hardly changed for seven centuries.

Yet “those” is tricky for other reasons. One of its uses is to point to something, like “those trees over there”. (We can imagine that the first uses of language must have been for physical things that the speaker and listener could both see.)

But “those” gets less physical, more conceptual, when it refers to things mentioned, not seen. “There are some palm trees here, and some others over the hill. Those other ones have a delicious but dangerous fruit.” Again, this simple word gets extended, so smoothly that we hardly see it.

Sometimes you can’t tell what “those” actually refers to until you listen a few words further:

What does “those” refer to? It could be either the gifts:

or the hosts:

Think you’ve got “those” figured out? How about its use in this set phrase? (Found mostly in Scotland.)

I won’t tell you here — trying searching for the phrase though and see if you can figure it out. The point is that words get used in many contexts, and even co-opted to creative uses, and a single word doesn’t have a single meaning.

Why should we care, though? Words shift, and the world goes on turning.

The point is that language has no fixed meaning. It changes over time, and even at one moment, a word means different things in different places to different people. If even a single word is so hard to pin down, think about the infinite combinations of words in sentences, in emails, presentations, and calls.

What makes language mean something? The context. That is: everything about the moment when it’s used, and the people using it. Especially the people on the “receiving” end: the listeners or readers. They can’t go to neat codebooks to understand; they mostly need to use the context.

(At work, that’s really hard in low-context situations. Remote and short of time, it’s hard to see the picture. The worst is when an impatient exec, who knows little of your domain, demands a three-bullet summary and won’t discuss it more.)

The primacy of context shows us why communication can go so wrong. In the next post, I’ll share some better news. Knowing why language works at all despite all the barriers, we’ll do more of the things that make it work. Our teams and even bosses may respond, and we’ll stress less.