i know what i said. i also know what i meant. unfortunately, the other person received only the first item, and customer service is now closed.
“i’m so hungry i could eat the gap between what i said and what i meant” appeared on my Tumblr dashboard, and approximately thirteen thousand people recognized the meal. this is because human communication is less like sending a document and more like handing someone three receipts, a weather report, and a look that made perfect sense at the time.
language has always required unpaid interpretive labor
there is a proper philosophical term for some of this: implicature. the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes it as meaning or implying one thing by saying something else. we do it constantly. “it’s getting late” may mean “i should leave,” “you should leave,” or “please acknowledge that time has continued while neither of us made a decision.”
conversation works because people usually cooperate in filling that space. context, tone, facial expression, shared history, and the fact that you have heard me use “interesting” as a death sentence all help.
then we moved a large portion of human intimacy into little gray bubbles and acted surprised when the infrastructure began producing ghosts.
texting preserves the words and invents the weather
a text message removes most of the cues that normally carry the rest of the sentence. it keeps the punctuation, which is unfortunate, because punctuation immediately accepted a second job as emotional telemetry.
“okay” is neutral. “okay!” is enthusiastic. “Okay.” means i need to review the previous six months of our relationship with outside counsel. none of these rules are written down, universally agreed upon, or stable across age groups, which is exactly how we prefer to run critical infrastructure.
dating makes the translation layer worse because everyone is trying to communicate interest without appearing to possess interest. you say “no worries” while manufacturing several worries locally. somebody says “we should do this again,” and the word should enters evidence. a reply takes forty minutes, and your brain produces a limited series about what happened during minutes thirty-two through thirty-seven.
anxiety is a very committed copy editor
the problem is not only that other people can misunderstand us. it is that we can misunderstand them with incredible production values.
anxiety takes a message with two possible readings, selects the one that causes the most administrative work, and marks it final. now the gap between what they said and what they meant has been furnished, zoned, and given a small municipal government.
sometimes the subtext is real. people are indirect, conflict-avoidant, flirtatious, scared, or simply hoping to retain plausible deniability. “maybe” has buried entire civilizations. pretending language contains no subtext would be its own kind of illiteracy.
but subtext is not telepathy. silence is not a signed affidavit. response time is evidence mostly of response time. if the answer matters, eventually somebody has to ask the embarrassing direct question and allow the other person to give an actual answer. this is terrible news for those of us who had prepared twelve excellent theories instead.
the appeal may proceed
i would like every message to arrive with expandable fields labeled WHAT I SAID, WHAT I MEANT, and WHAT I AM AFRAID YOU WILL THINK I MEANT. this feature has not shipped.
until then, communication remains a collaborative draft. we say something incomplete, somebody interprets it through the entire haunted library of their experience, and, if we are lucky, both parties stay long enough to compare notes.
the gap is not food, but i have spent a lot of time chewing it.