Vocabulary

I bought my wife an MP3 player for Christmas. She’d been wanting one, but couldn’t ever get around to figuring which one would be a good one to own and use. I searched around and found one for a good price and sent it to her in time for Christmas.

Shortly after Christmas, she complained that the manual didn’t tell her what the controls were and how it worked. I told her that since iPod had come on the scene, all MP3 player manufacturers have tried to make the controls on their MP3 players "intuitive".

“What does intuitive mean?” she asked me on IM, “Does that mean ‘user-friendly’?”

“Yes,” I typed.

“Then why didn’t you just use ‘user-friendly’?” she asked, “I’m going to look up a fancy word for ‘jackass’ and start using that when I talk about you!”

Vocabulary doesn’t always accomplish what it was intended. Sometimes words just get in the way of trying to express what we mean. My wife isn’t uneducated, and she isn’t slow. In fact, her tongue is nearly as sharp as her wit. She just doesn’t have the exposure to all the words that I have, and in my attempt to be concise by using a “two-dollar word” to say what I mean, I actually made it harder for communication to happen.

Sometimes, we’re our own worst enemies when it comes to communication. The way we say things and how we say them can make the communicating process messy.

Posted by: HarryTick™ on 2. March 2008, 19:47 |