Explanations are hard

People over complicate things. You over complicate things. I over complicate things. It’s okay I’m sure you don’t mean to, most people I imagine don’t like to over complicate things, but they do. Explaining things is hard and we only have so many tools to do it. The most common one is language, and language, as wonderful as it is, is woefully bad at being precise. 

There are professionals who train to be precise, the science communicators and technical writers of the world, but also the poets and song writers. Their jobs are similar; to convey or describe something so someone else can understand as clearly as possible. This is very hard. 

Can you explain the colour blue to someone who has never seen it before with only words? Maybe, but it’s going to be tough. You could point at the sky on a clear day. Much more concise. But what if they’re colour blind, how do you explain blue? See, language is hard. It’s a stand in for what we experience and it’s not exact, language and the world don’t have a 1:1 relationship.

Poets and song writers have been trying to put ‘love’ into words for centuries and still aren’t able to do it. Love seems to be a universal feeling that we all experience, and yet, describing it in a way that everyone understands is impossible, what hope is there for explaining something that everyone doesn’t experience? 

Frankly, there’s very little hope. So when you’re trying to explain something, use examples, use visuals, point, draw, sing, scream, dance. If appropriate. See how you get explaining something a report back what worked. Especially if you explain through dance. That sounds fun.