Face it, communication is difficult

This morning I had to make a choice.  Should I do my sit-ups on the smiley face or the frown?  They were both drawn by a child on the ground in my new favorite place in the city to do sit-ups.  I've been running here for 15 years and never had a special place.  But, after my idyllic abdominal location in Paris (Arenes de Lutece), and having lacked the urge to find one in Italy (my abdominal locations seemed to be pizzerias and gelaterias) I decided to find one in Chicago.  I like it.  It's next to the pond, which is next to the Farm in the Zoo in Lincoln Park.

Back to the chalk faces. They got me thinking.  And it's always nice to have something to think about when you're doing sit-ups.  Where did the smiley face symbol come from?  It really doesn't look like a face, but we all know it when we see it.  And at what age do we start to recognize it? 

It reminded me of when I was teaching English to an entry level class of refugees.  First I taught them the words for bird and tree and house using real photographs of these things.  Then, we moved on to a little drawing and they had to identify how many of each of the items were in each drawing.  That's when I learned that not every 40-year old man in the world knows that the little "m" floating around in the background of a drawing is a bird.  And he didn't know what the tree was either. When I asked him how many birds there were in drawing number 9, he couldn't answer.  He quickly went to the correct drawing, which proved to me that he knew his numbers.  But then he just sat there silently looking at the little house with two chimneys, the sidewalk, three trees and 4 birds.  In Africa, if you don't go to school and you don't have crayons and paper to color with, you don't learn that little "m's" are birds.  And maybe you don't learn that a circle with a couple of dots with another half circle inside is a smiley face.

Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately for a nut like me, I didn't grow up in Africa.  I learned that the circle around the two dots with the other half circle meant happiness.  I also learned that a cowboy with a few big letters in the background (but some blocked out so you really couldn't read anything) stood for Marlboro cigarettes.  And luckily I knew that a giant golden M in the sky wasn't a big bird.  Sometimes we have to extrapolate.  Now, ask me to extrapolate with words and I can't do it.   We have plenty of words to link a few of them together, make a coherent sentence and say what we really mean.  I think it's a dangerous business to say something with hopes or assumptions that your listener will understand.  Immature on my part?  Taking things too literally?  Maybe.  But why risk it?  You might be making a big mistake thinking that your audience has understood your obvious, or sometimes hidden, meaning.

Now for a girl who loves foreign languages, this presents a bit of a problem.  I certainly can't be sure that I know what I'm saying or that I'm really understanding what I'm hearing.  My boss in France almost always spoke English with me.  But when he really wanted it to be clear, he spoke French and I had to extrapolate! It might have made him feel more comfortable to try to get his point across in his own language,
but his audience was left with a giant cowboy in front of a few of the letters and it made no sense at all.

Sometimes even when we're speaking the same language we still only hear what we want to hear.  Take yesterday as an example.  As I pulled up to the studio on my bike one of my neighbors yelled out, "You look great today."  I quickly accepted the compliment with, "Thank you."   Only to realize a few minutes later that he actually said, "You were late today." 

Back to the chalk under the canopy in the park.  I had to choose between a smiley face and a frown.  Or I could've chosen a part of the ground that hadn't been drawn on, but why live in no-man's land?  I had a choice to make and it seemed like doing sit-ups on a giant smiley face would be a great way to start my day.  Especially because the artist really made himself clear.  In addition to the drawings, he'd labeled them with words.  One said "happy face" and the other said "mad face."  Without the words I would've taken it as a sad face.  Who thinks of the frown as a mad face?  This artist does.  And instead of making me extrapolate, he spelled it out.  There's a big difference between SAD and MAD and as I momentarily considered doing the sit-ups on the sad face because it's okay to be sad and sometimes one should embrace their sadness, I never would've considered plopping myself down on the mad face.  I applaud this artist for making it clear.

Some people say a picture paints a thousand words.  I say words paint a thousand pictures.  Either way, things aren't always clear.  And I think it's okay to ask for a thousand more words if that's what it takes to get the picture. :-)