Ever said something “stupid”? (Haven’t we all?) And how does that happen? Can blind spots help explain our verbal blunders?

Maybe our goof-ups show not how dumb we are, but how creative we can be. When we encounter jargon that is meaningless to us, our minds cleverly produce a meaning that makes some sense in the situation. The story about tech support is funny partly because it’s easy to believe that a person desperately calling tech support might translate “cursor” into “curser”!

The truth is that the meaning of what’s said depends on the situation, and the person who “doesn’t get it” is not stupid, but simply unfamiliar with the context or unable to interpret the cues in the situation.

There’s a cartoon in which a young woman in Church is raising her hand earnestly in response to a rhetorical question the preacher has posed in his sermon. The caption is: “Karen has never learned to recognize rhetorical questions.” This is funny because Karen “doesn’t get it.” But what exactly is it that she doesn’t get?

Karen probably knows that the preacher is not asking rhetorical questions like “What is the meaning of life?” because he has no clue as to the answer. So Karen assumes that the preacher is asking a “classroom question.” In a classroom, teachers who already know the answers to the questions they raise reward enthusiastic hand-waving students for their efforts to answer.

What Karen doesn’t get is that rhetorical questions are neither genuine questions in which the questioner is really seeking answers from listeners, nor classroom questions in which the questioner knows the answer but wants you to prove that you know it too. Rhetorical questions are not really questions at all, but statements phrased as questions to emphasize a point.

Anyone who’s unfamiliar with the terms being used, or with the social situation, can blunder. I heard a great story years ago about newly-arrived immigrants who found their neighbors at their apartment door one evening, bearing a welcome basket. After sharing coffee together, the neighbors departed with a wave. “See you later,” they said. And the immigrant family stayed up until midnight, worried that these friendly neighbors might return at any moment.

So let’s cut a little slack when people who are unfamiliar with our customs and our language misinterpret what’s being said. If we ask ourselves “Hmmm. What could be going wrong here?” we might realize something about the complexity of how language is interpreted instead of concluding that another person is “stupid.”