The key is the right words

December 26, 2023 1:34 AM

I couldn’t decide. Hmmm, I replied, then commented that I should have a ready answer. He wasn’t the first to ask, and I’d had time to think about the question. Plenty of time—years, in fact. So why didn’t I have a convincing reply? Probably because my answer felt inadequate. It wasn’t, after all, some verifiable claim I might make about Spanish customs or the Spanish character vs. the American. Rather, my feeling that it was so easy in the States to communicate with people in offices, shops, or on the street, with neighbors, friends, and family, compared with the struggle it often is to understand and be understood in Spanish. And my trouble with the Spanish language couldn’t, surely, be the essential difference between life in the States and life in Spain? Talk about solipsism! from Lighting a Match by Clellan Coe
posted by chavenet (2 comments total)

That must be why I still live in Spain, on the outside, dreaming of one day finding my way in.

This has been my experience - it is easier, in some ways, to be able to choose to be out-of-place somewhere where there is an obvious reason to point to, than to feel ill-fit in the place you came from for reasons harder to define.
posted by EvaDestruction at 8:02 AM on December 26, 2023 [6 favorites]

When no words I can think of will bring me closer to my brother because a complicated thing like our vision is different, not a simple one like our language? What then? Yes, differing ways and views are as likely to be encountered with Spaniards, only you don’t know it, stumbling and bruising yourself first on words, not ideas. Here’s my answer: in the States, when language fails to lead to the right warm feeling, I believe such a feeling doesn’t exist.

The paradox of communication says that accurate transmission of ideas from one mind to another depends on the similarity of those minds - the less differences, the less lossy is the transmission. Therefore, true communication happens only when the sending and receiving minds are identical. At which point, no communication has happened.

This happens with my husband, where we see the same series of stimuli and both start to remark the same random idea to each other, and then fall to laughter. I call it "having a tube connecting our brains", but it's just because we've had the same environmental stimuli and experiences going on 15 years now.
posted by rebent at 9:02 AM on December 26, 2023 [1 favorite]