Literally Challenged

Sometimes, reading someone’s communication can be a challenge - trying to find the nugget of meaning hidden in the dross of bad grammar, misspellings, the distractions that plagued the writer, poor technology support, & down-right carelessness. It’s a game, & some people are better at it than others. Two people reading the same email or SMS can mine different information out of the same jumble of phrases. The problem is that there’s no guarantee that either person got the intended meaning or all of the meaning that was ‘provided’. You will note that I’m talking about technology-based communication here, & most likely the asynchronous kind where you don’t get the immediate option of responding with “huh?”

The literal meaning is not necessarily the intent of the author. But at what point do you take “but that’s not what the author meant” to be a more valid approach than “but that’s what they said!”. Let’s ignore my use of a Greek argument style here for the time being, & I’ll apologise to de Bono later - I would not suggest that a creative approach to communication interpretation is any more appropriate in the circumstances.

So, what do you ‘do’ when coming back from a long walk & you’re faced with a message carved in the bole of a tree (for all the good an email is, with the slight advantage that it’s more environmentally friendly) & you realise that you’ve missed the other party by only a few hours? Panic. Honestly, it’s better that way. The adrenaline will save you from taking out a pen-knife & attempting to correct their bad grammar & spelling with cold, logical, & misguided, precision. That’s your interpretation.

My advice is simple. If you don’t understand the message, simply ignore it. Claim that you thought a five-year-old had broken into the person’s email account & was spamming their address book, as no adult with a rudimentary education could possibly have sent such a poor apology for an epistle intentionally. Try to keep a straight face when doing so (note, de Bono might have avoided saying po-faced).

This is the only way to deal with people who think that communication is ‘easy’ & therefore requires no effort - prove to them how wrong they are & how stupid they are for believing in punctuation pixies, grammar gnomes, or spelling sprites who will make sense of their attempts, as these are obviously no more than faerie tales.

Game on.