Language Is Arbitrary!

Practice Tolerance.

Posted by Philosophies Conclude on April 23, 2020 · 3 mins read

Dear Baby Girl,

Another point I want to make is, language is arbitrary. It is a very fluid medium used to communicate. Most people have their definitions, which creates a constant source of misunderstandings and ambiguity. This creates a struggle between being concise or verbose. The right answer, probably like most things, is in the middle.

Conciseness is clear, short, and direct. Well, that is the intent. The problem is with language itself. Language is inherently ambiguous. It is also continually evolving and changing in meaning, leading to the understanding of any given statement being dependent on the author and recipient sharing the same context. A good author can understand and communicate in the context of their audience and do so concisely. But since a person is always changing, what might be clear one day may be unclear the next. If you have little to no redundancy when communicating, it becomes hard to understand the underlying meanings and implications. If your communication does not need to persist, then conciseness is usually the best option. But if you need to have your communication continue beyond the current context, then verbosity will be helpful.

Verboseness is the notion of building the context of your conversation into the conversation itself. In this way, you can increase the chances of a successful communication. It will also typically provide redundancy of a given point by discussing it from multiple viewpoints. The drawback to this style is it can be very wordy. It is very prone to rambling, but it lets you discuss nuances that may be necessary for the reader to understand something sufficiently. Unfortunately for you, I ramble. Unfortunately, I do not know what your context will be when you read this, and I want you to understand me. (You can translate that to what it means. Daddy isn't a good author, and is to lazy to learn to be one.)

There are many odd things about language in general. One thing is people have trigger words or hot phrases that set them off. Once they go off, the ability to communicate effectively becomes difficult. You should avoid choosing to be a victim to other peoples word choices. Tolerance is accepting of other people's context and trying to understand it. It means to overcome your own hot words and phrases when others trigger them so you can keep the lines of communication open. In other words, a tolerant person strives to maintain the lines of communication.

My advice to you is to practice tolerance when communicating with others. A simple way is to try and understand the context of their reality. Try to imagine yourself in that perspective so you can better understand where they are coming from. After all, the objective is to understand the concept they are trying to convey, so use what data you have to try to figure it out.