Communication is Hard

- make this into a real article

Something I don't think most people understand is that communication is hard, like really, really hard and requires effort from both the speaker and the listener. Everyone just thinks you say some words and you're all done but that is wildly inaccurate.

Everything goes out through your filter but it comes in through my filter and they are NOT the same filter. It is entirely possible that even if I hear all the words correctly I will still get a different meaning from the words than what you intended. This is partially because of…

We each have a personal dictionary that we probably don't realize we have. If we grew up in the same time and place then our dictionaries probably have a lot of overlap but there will still be differences because we each live individual lives and have individual experiences. Maybe something weird happened in third grade and ever since then the word “rotten” has some odd connotations for you. No two people live the same life and consequently different things develop different meanings. And the further apart we grew up in time and space the more our dictionaries will differ.