Watch your mouth, you have just been horsing around with a dead Beatle.

(No offense, George Harrison. That begged itself, punwise. I’m sure you understand.)

Going back to the math stuff, I would like to use this opportunity to point out that the overwhelming majority of people have more than the expected number of legs.

Having said that, I expect it is necessary to clarify that it is not my intention to demean the underwhelming minority of people.

And remember: when she told you you were average, she was just being mean.

Indeed, the meaning of words is not always expected, especially when the demeanor of the utterer cannot be observed.

Never beat a dead horse on the mouth.

I guess I’m meandering.

I wrote some sketchy thoughts on imperfect human communications, the fact that people often read completely different things into the exact same words … and on that very posting I managed to add a comment that you took as an accusation of pomposity, where none was intended.

I had no idea my above comment could be taken as implying a pompous attitude on your part; if anything was pompous it was clearly my reply, and for that I apologize.

To beat this dead horse silly, let’s do a post-mortem dissection of the misunderstanding! :)

I was reacting (in a knee-jerk fashion, sorry) to the words “This example shows that effectively we need to reduce …” which I did not agree with. That was the “leap of logic” I objected to; “no, it does not show that” because your colleague had no real problem.

But in the process, I used the phrase “dumb down” which you presumably took to mean that you seemed to consider yourself superior to others. I was thinking of humans as a whole collectively “dumbing down” their use of language, e.g. storekeepers ceasing to use the phrase “amount tendered” on their receipts because people are not generally familiar with that sense of the word “tender” — and that is also how I thought you intended your phrase “reduce our verbal communications” (as you probably did). My point is that no such reduction is called for (fortunately, because it would have the ill effects of making language boring, and in the long run dumbing it down for real across the board, but that’s beside the point.)

So my choice of the loaded phrase “dumb down” triggered an alarm in your head saying “uh-oh, I’m being mistaken for an arrogant elitist” and you had to reply to beat that unpleasant smell off. That was not at all the spirit in which I used those words … but they sure invited that interpretation. Sorry!

My, wasn’t that a fun dissection. (If you enjoyed this, try a frog next time; click “Demos” at the top right.) But also there was an important difference between the example you took and the kind of miscommunication I was discussing.

In your example, the use of “tender” may cause someone to think “how odd that they use this word here,” but it doesn’t cause any real confusion. The exact sense of the words is not familiar to both people, but that’s OK, the context makes things clear. [And nobody reads the non-numeric parts of the store receipt anyway, but that's beside the point.]

In contrast, I was talking about the potential for real confusion: where one person emits a thought encoded into words, and the other person decodes those words into a completely different thought. Different senses of the words themselves may cause this, but even (as in our case) when the exact sense of each word is fully clear to both, still the context or spirit of the message can get scrambled in transit. A flaw somewhere in the encoding-decoding process causes real confusion.

And lo, we got a live specimen of that kind of miscommunication, right here in the comments!

I suppose the more abstract the message (discussions of emotion and attitudes and personality characteristics and such), the more likely this is to happen, because in abstract subjects context probably helps less to make things clear than in concrete subjects (such as “please pass me the bread”).

So sending a clear message is easy only when the subject is very simple … and as soon as you try to send messages whose subjects are more abstract (and thus more important or more interesting to talk about), that’s when you have to get careful about presentation; that’s when you need to consider the “language barrier” that stands — with varying height — between any two minds.

And maybe that’s what you meant, anyway. Can’t really be too sure; we were discussing abstract stuff, after all. :)

In any case, sorry I bungled into portraying you as pompous. You are just about the last person I would willingly do that to.

I agree that the word “tender” does not keep people awake at night, at least not the dictionary definition of it. The problem I face is that I find it often difficult to understand other people – perhaps that is a unique problem that I have. I do not need to dumb anything down, on the contrary.

I am not trying to fix anything, nor is there anything that needs to be fixed – I was just pointing out that the only clear message we can send is by using a lowest common denominator: “could you please pass me the bread?”

As for this specific word, “tender,” it should hardly surprise us if it turned out to have different origins for these very different meanings. Sure enough, the dictionary says the money/business sense derives from Latin tendere: to hold forth or extend (note: ex-tend), and the loving-spoonfuls sense derives from Latin tener: soft or, well, tender. Same root as “thin” in English, they say. There you go. Sometimes different words end up with the same spelling and pronunciation. Tough! But no biggie.

On the way home from work today I had a store receipt in my hand an on it said: “amount tendered”, and I asked my colleague what it meant. I had heard the term: “to tender an offer”, “this note is a legal tender for all debts” and of course – “tender loving care”. My colleague who is born in the state of Washington and has lived in the US for all his life did not know the exact meaning of the word – just how it is often used.

This example shows that effectively we need to reduce our verbal communications to a set of lowest common denominator – and that set is unfortunately not large enough to clearly elaborate one’s thoughts.