Comment by basilikum
9 hours ago
I'm usually precise in my wording and choose specific words for a reason and am also sometimes annoyed by people ignoring the preciseness.
However I also sometimes cannot find the correct precise words to describe what I mean in unambiguous, but also concise words, so I sometimes choose much less precise words for lack of a better alternative. Oftentimes I denote that when I find it important, but it happens way too often to do that every time.
Also words simply aren't completely precise. A word might be perfectly fitting for what I want to say with it in a situation, but someone else understands it as something slightly different and they are not wrong about it. Words often simply do not have one exact shared meaning.
Natural language is imprecise and it is fundamentally a lossy compression function. One that uses a shared dictionary that is not identical for both encoder and decoder. You simply need some amount of error correction in encoding and decoding.
In the same way that the "worse" a speaker is at communicating the more likely something gets lost, the same is true the "worse" the audience is at listening or paying attention or understanding. Both ends make the connection. This will be easy to read as calling the audience dumb, but that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying the ability to understand involves trying and the audience has some control over successful communication much like the speaker does. They can sit with the idea for a second longer before responding, learn and pickup (or ask about) whatever gap they have if they’re not up to speed, or in many cases just listen without distraction.
Conversations have various power dynamics where one person may have more of the burden, but it is far from always a speaker pitching something to someone who isn't inclined to it. Peers leave hallway chats regularly having “aligned” on two different things. Lots of things we’re talking about are actually complex and simple communication will effectively be miscommunication.
I think we’ve moved too far to broadly attributing confusion to weak speaking. It can certainly help to keep polishing and reworking your words to overcome worse and worse listening habits. That can take one very far, but it doesn’t change that we’re making the bar higher and higher and therefore more messages/ideas dissipate into air.