“Words matter.” Perhaps you remember your 3rd grade teacher correcting “can I go to the bathroom?” to “may I”; perfecting the niceties of language goes some way toward securing strong interactions with people. And yet even when the words are right for the moment, they may be wrong for the person hearing or reading them. The dictionary has a lot to say about words, but individuals have even more and often contradictory things to experience of language. Your history of the word “home” is different from mine (though if you had a house fire as a child, we have some similar personal dictionary entries). I hear “excellent” or “this needs work” and a number of memories, stories, and definitions are illuminated. Precision is therefore not an immediately available objective in communication; it’s difficult to know what messages are sent and received until time for processing and understanding has elapsed, and even then, the images and sensations formed in any given mind will be beyond any perfect grasp.
Perhaps a language consisting only of facial expressions and gestures would risk less than one that relies on these challenging words. But the search for shared meaning between people can be helped by sentences, as long as the limitations become parts of speech. Immediacy, precision, and narrative are among the most important limitations. Understanding takes time and reflection, and requests or information sharing should take this constraint into account. When a difficult or important conversation takes place, do not imagine that the message will be fully received or interpreted at the moment it is sent. The “conversation” will need to happen over several stages (and probably days) to end up with anything close to shared understanding.
Precision is another key conversational limitation. One constructs pictures and sketches of something to communicate in one’s head and imagines that these conceptual notions will be transferred to another mind in conversation. No such copy & paste exactitude is possible, however. Many of the things you say will create completely different images in the mind of the message recipient(s). It’s necessary to confirm, re-confirm, and then find another way to ask what comes up in someone’s mind when a message is communicated (and let time pass between, as referenced above).
Narrative limitations are a unique hurdle in communication and perhaps more difficult to overcome than any of the other challenges. People bring their entire personal histories to every conversation, and patterns, opposites, and emotions will be brought into the conversation invisibly in unpredictable ways. It is useful to think of the human brain as physical to deal with narrative limitations: each experience, feeling and thought that goes into a brain makes a real, physical change to brain hardware, not an erasable, totally rewritable change as if the brain were software. These hard-wired, inevitable changes make up key interpretations of any given word, phrase, or message. And of course there is no way to understand the entirety of a person’s set of stories and hardware changes (as much as many parents may wish they could). But this doesn’t mean it’s not deeply worthwhile to ask questions and listen carefully to the narrative (and physical) changes that someone has experienced in their life. Patterns and the act of sharing stories will make communication dramatically more effective (while helping to overcome difficulties of immediacy and precision at the same time).
Words are more than their dictionary definitions to we communicators and it takes more than speaking the same language to speak together using language. But this does not make the project of communication devoid of possibility, nor the search for tentative, partial understanding fruitless.