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Comment by abathur | Hacker News Reader

Spending time in meetings with someone who insists on near-complete terminological clarity from everyone involved ~illuminates just how hard it is to communicate precisely and consistently. (In my case, this person is a CEO who's had past lives in engineering and finance, IIRC.)

Setting aside the communication skills of specific engineers, various stakeholders can still have both wildly and subtly different senses of what they mean by common terms.

For example, I find there's a fair amount of chaos surrounding very common terms like "product" and "content" that tend to mean different things in different systems and to people in different roles/departments.

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I've interacted with government and insurance attorneys for various work gigs and some of them have impressed me with their insistence on clarity, too. I find it challenging and fun to communicate that way, albeit I've only ever done it in small 'doses'. (I'd guess it follows a dose-response relationship that veers off toward madness pretty quickly.)

I get a similiar kind of kick from observing people communicating technically and precisely to complete a task-- launching rockets, doing performing surgery, controlling air traffic, etc.

Being precise (not vague) with your language is a learned skill. I started practicing is after reading 12 rules for life (it's one of them).

It really makes a difference in everyday life. It prevents so many arguments with my wife: we agree on most things, when we don't it's usually because we disagree on the meaning of the words we're using. At work I have far less misunderstandings with coworkers, I understand expectations better and I don't get caught out by people using vague language to hide or gloss over major problems. Last month I was evaluating a contract and it took me a week to get a clear answer about terms. I suspect the people involved subconsciously knew that if they gave a clear answer the contract would be deemed unecessary and cancelled. It was.

Ugh... I am a very precise communicator, and my wife --- Not so much.

I love her dearly, but I cannot count the number of times I have enraged her by asking her to elaborate or seeking clarification about a pronoun or some other vaguery by asking questions she believes "I should know the answer to because I'm too smart not to know"

We're getting there, though :)

Lol my wife is the same and it drives me nuts. She will say go get me "x". I'm like where? And then she'll say "the closet" or something like that and I'll have to ask "which closet" and so on.

(Taking light-hearted commentary too seriously)

Something that young children have to grow out of is assuming that "if they know it, their parents must know it too", such as where they put (not hid, because "the parents know") the phone or the keys. As a child they haven't yet developed the, obvious once developed, concept of the individuality of knowledge and experience.

It does feel as if this regresses for long-term partners. The volume of shared experience must blur the boundaries of individual experience, or something.

My wife will often blurt out something totally incomprehensible to anyone but her, but since she's spent the previous 5-10 minutes reading / watching all the context leading up to it, she expects the rest of us (who may have only just strolled into the room) to know it to its core.

A punchline without context is nothing!

I do like the sideways glances my kids give me when it happens though. That's a shared understanding :)

I've known lots of intelligent adults who assumed their particular knowledge was common knowledge. Most were polite about it and realized their mistake; a few were quite obnoxious and learned nothing.

Anecdotally, I wonder if/ to what degree this has been affected by increased job specialization, where a person who spends all day working (and perhaps socializing after) with folks who share their particular knowledge and jargon will then err when interacting with folks outside of that bubble.

> It does feel as if this regresses for long-term partners. The volume of shared experience must blur the boundaries of individual experience, or something.

This is so true, and painfully so. I was fortunate to have an epiphany a few years ago when I realized I was failing regularly to see my wife as a separate individual and part of the whole of "us."

More accurately, there were times when I probably viewed her merely and extension of myself. It honestly changed the way I view the world, and I somehow managed to extrapolate that understanding to life itself. It was a glorious dose of ego death, and one I sorely needed.

Cannot not think of this quote from C.S. Lewis' "That hideous strength":

> “The cardinal difficulty,” said MacPhee, “in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, ‘Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you’ll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.’ The female for this is, ‘Put that in the other one in there.’ And then if you ask them, ‘in where?’ they say, ‘in there, of course.’ There is consequently a phatic hiatus.”

Ironically, given that the discussion is about clarity of language, I had to look up the meaning of “phatic hiatus”; it refers to a pause in conversation. For more on this, see https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/592225/is-the-fo...

I looked up phatic also. Great word. denoting or relating to language of a general purposes of social interaction.

What a sexist comment.

The longer I spend on social media the more I have learned that the only differences between men and women is that men are terrible and women are awesome. Right?

> What a sexist comment.

Indeed. The author seems to imply that men are so bad at understanding contextual clues that communication with them is virtually impossible, almost as if they were primitive machines and not full-fledged human beings capable of observing and thinking. Even worse, when confronted with this uncomfortable truth, instead of learning how to communicate properly, they react with frustration, almost as if they were primitive animals driven by instincts and emotions and not full-fledged human beings capable of learning.

Still, I find it hilarious, even though I am a man myself!

And on a more serious note – why, when presented with two different phenomena (in this case: men and women, but there are many more cases, like "SQL" and "NoSQL", or "Rust" and "Clojure", or "GUI" and "CLI", etc., etc.), so many people automatically assume that one must be somehow strictly "better" and the other somehow strictly "worse"? Of course, it's sometimes (maybe even often) the case, but neither "sometimes" nor "often" does not mean "always"!

Wholeheartedly agree! We are drowning in false dichotomy and always wanting to know what is "the best" as if there were an absolute measure of goodness. You just can't project a high dimensional space down to a single dimension.

I love your rhetorical twist on sexism, which exposes a harmful aspect of stereotypes. The positive stereo type, "all X are good at Y, or naturals at Z"

We both know people who are dogmatically over precise in their language, it has its use, but becomes exhausting after while, esp where not needed. Here comes the generalization, but the use of overly pedantic forms of communication come from either an environment with high complexity, or a person using another as an extension of their own self and that manipulator (the assistant) literally has no context, so everything has to be over explained. When your groovin, all you need is a look.

Part of this is sharing of effort. Given a vague request, you can demand clarity or you can go try to work it to your best ability. Guess the most likely closet and go check it. If not there, go check the next one. Etc.

This approach is harder on you… but easier on her. And that is a sort of gift that one can choose to give to a spouse. Allow them to be quick and vague sometimes, and choose to invest effort to pick up some of the slack they drop.

Not all the time, but some of the time.

> At work I have far less misunderstandings with coworkers [...]

You have fewer* misunderstandings ;)

In case your point is that using "less" instead of "fewer" for countable nouns is an example of unclear communication, let me disagree with the point.

Less so (more awkward) here than in other cases, but it's as if the misunderstandings were smaller in magnitude rather than quantity or frequency.

"portal" is a good one. Depending on the speaker it can mean an entire website, or a single link, or just about anything in between.

Or a very specific iframe-like HTML tag!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/po...

Similarly, how many people in meetings won't actually speak up if they aren't familiar with a term or acronym in context. I'm often surprised when I ask, and then several others mention they weren't sure either.

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