Oh lord, please don't let me be more than a little misunderstood

Many years ago, I was at a hotel in the 6th Arrondissement with my mother and we were looking for a place to get escargot. She asked the concierge where to go for it, and suddenly he turned pale. 

“It is illegal.” 

We were of course baffled because the idea of eating snails being outlawed in the global capital of eating snails seemed outrageous. As we pushed back the man at the desk became increasingly flustered as he leafed through a stack of brochures. Finally he produced a paper advertisement for an establishment with a name like Place du Desire– presumably a Parisian strip club. 

It was reasonably apparent to us that this was probably not somewhere that served snails, and we went back and forth with the guy in this fashion for several minutes before an affable-seeming British gentleman who had been sitting nearby reading a newspaper took interest in the exchange. 

“They’re looking for somewhere that serves escargot.” 

Suddenly the color returned to the concierge’s face and everyone involved began cracking up. What he had thought, it turns out, was that my mother was looking for an escort. 

Put aside for the moment my longstanding suspicion that French-speakers have a tendency to pretend not to know what you’re saying. This exchange has been playing back in my mind for over a decade, and I still cannot fathom the difference between our pronunciation and that of our savior. 

On reflection, what may have been at issue was that the gulf of understanding was so narrow as to be nearly imperceptible. In that moment, neither party could possibly comprehend that the other didn’t understand what they were saying, leaving a rift that could only be bridged via the intervention of a third. 

Here, the dissonance ended up being rather extreme, but it doesn’t always have to be. A few years ago a friend of mine began using the term “wash” in habitual fashion. 

“We went out last night but it was a wash.” 

To me and hopefully you, this term when used colloquially, refers to a situation with a neutral outcome. What I came to realize after maybe months of “washes,” however, was that this was not what he meant. To him, a wash was a situation characterized by a somewhat negative outcome. Losing a game of Super Smash Brothers was, for example, a wash. 

What’s maybe even a little bit disturbing is the realization that this could be happening to everyone all of the time. While admittedly out of my depth when it comes to the inner workings of the human mind, what’s probably undeniable is that our minds do not work the same as one another's. I’ve often heard, and am hoping science has not disproved, that we really don’t have any way of telling if we all see colors the same way. Blue might not look the same way to you as it does to me. Why not then extend the concept to words, smells, and the precise location of the lines on a divided highway? Because we tend to evaluate things in terms of outcome, we often don’t have a good reason to investigate just how we got there. 

Great, you didn’t crash– seems like you understand the road.

I can’t really recommend spending too much time thinking about this because if you do, you may find it increasingly difficult to discern between when you’re talking with someone and when you’re both talking at each other. Are they thinking what I’m thinking? Feeling what I’m feeling? You'd better hope it’s at least close– maybe it’s a wash. And once you’ve discovered the outer bounds of our ability to get one another, you may join me in thinking that maybe Eric Burdon got a little bit greedy when he beseeched his creator not to let him be misunderstood– like that was ever going to happen.