We treat dictionaries like wise tomes that have settled everything. We go to the book, open to the word, and say, there, that’s what the word means. Except that dictionaries tend to miss the fact that language is a living thing.
My best friend, Heather, and I have a word. A word we throw at each other, and that word covers a multitude of sins and smiles. It started simply as a greeting. Instead of saying hello, good day, or good morning, a text will appear at the start of my day, and that text simply says: Moo. I return a moo. As we have known each other, that Moo has evolved from a greeting to a moniker. Sometimes when I drop her a text or when we meet for coffee, she’ll say: Hi, Moo. And I will do the same: Hey, Moo, how are you today?
I have no idea how it started or who started it; I’m sure it was at some 4H festival or county fair where there were bovines, and we said Moo to a cow and the cow answered us with a moo. We found that funny, and the word fell into our friendship lexicon. That’s the unwritten book of phrases, thoughts, images, and connections we, as friends and sometimes partners, build between each other. Little words and phrases that mean nothing to anyone but our best friend or partner. Moo is part of my lexicon with Heather. But we all have one; just think about it. I’ve always felt that losing a girlfriend is hard because you build all that fun stuff between you, and then, when she leaves you, you have this book no one else understands, and you have no one to read it with. If, for some reason, Heather stops being my friend, I will Moo into the void and nothing will come back to me.
I share this story because it fits with my theme. One afternoon, Heather and I were in a bookshop. I had a book in my hand I knew she would love, and I looked through the shelves and said, “Moo, this one is perfect for you,” and I slipped the book through the shelf to her, and that was that. But that wasn’t that because a woman beside me heard the exchange, and she waited outside the shop for us. She confronted me first, telling me I was heartless and thoughtless, and cruel for referring to my friend as a cow. She went on about what cows are and why calling a person, “especially a woman,” a cow is just about the worst thing anyone can do. Heather and I were shocked, and we spent the better part of half an hour with this woman trying to explain what the Moo meant and why it wasn’t offensive. She didn’t get it and ended the conversation with, “Well, if anyone, especially a man, called me a moo, I’d knock his teeth down his throat.” And she gathered herself and the cloud of judgment she traveled in and stormed off.
This woman didn’t understand, hadn’t read our lexicon, and made an assumption—in this case, a judgment about us, especially me—and found us lacking. We couldn’t figure it out, we didn’t understand, and we would have exhausted the entire day trying to explain a moo to a stranger. To me, it’s all about language, the vagaries of it, the vast majority of us speaking different languages with different meanings, and how the gulf between those languages and meanings causes us to experience pressure, and sometimes that pressure kills all communication.
We Don’t Speak the Same Language
In the movie Broadcast News, Holly Hunter’s character is having an argument on the phone with Albert Brooks’ character because he quit his job and didn’t tell her. She finally demands to see him and talk; he agrees and says: “I’ll meet you at the place by the thing where we went that time.” And she says, “Ok.” A couple of things are going on here: first, that’s a perfect sentence, and it completely encapsulates their relationship. We don’t need to know what that place is or where it is, because the characters do, and we feel safe because of that. We don’t need the details because it’s their conversation, and they know the details. Also, it’s a film, and the way it’s written lets us, the viewers, skip the details; we are just along for the ride. If the character had said something like, “Okay, well, let’s see, this is going to be a tough conversation, so we should meet at the gold-domed place, you know, the one near Haymarket, right off the orange line, the place that we went to after your divorce and you were super upset and they didn’t have anything and,” blah, blah, blah, kill me. People don’t talk that way to friends. We have a lexicon; we use the same language, and in that moment, we are able to recognize that these two are working out of a lexicon they share, and we don’t need to; we just accept they know what they’re talking about and we can go along with them without a worry.
Anyone hearing this conversation would be confused and maybe assume things, as the lady in the bookshop did. We didn’t speak the same language. Not literally, of course; we both spoke English, but we failed to communicate fully despite no language barrier or vocabulary snafu. Why? Because we tend to assume that if two people know a word’s definition, they understand each other. But definitions are only the beginning. Words arrive carrying experience, relationships, culture, memory, context, and assumptions. Heather had years of context attached to “Moo.” The woman had none. She filled the empty space with her own meaning. And her meaning didn’t take into consideration who Heather and I are, how long we’ve known each other, or the wondrous, magical history of the moo that is woven into the tapestry of life. She heard Moo, looked into her own lexicon, and decided this man is calling this woman a cow, and she would not stand for it.
This distinction matters because misunderstandings don’t always happen because one person isn’t listening. Bookstore woman listened; she could recite my words verbatim. She listened; she listened hard to gather the information about me, this terrible man, to use in the war she was about to wage on the street outside the shop. She listened, but what she heard was entirely different from what I meant.
The Dictionary Can’t Save You
We treat dictionaries like wise tomes that have settled everything. We go to the book, open to the word, and say, there, that’s what the word means. Except that dictionaries tend to miss the fact that language is a living thing. Theatergoers seeing Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream when it was first performed would hear, for the first time, the words eyeball and swagger. If you had been there, you could have rushed to your dictionary; if you could read and you could afford such a book, you could spend all day and an evening burning five candles before you realized those words were not in the book. The words had been invented right before their very ears.
Also, a dictionary gives you the accepted, expected, and agreed-upon general definition. But once a word comes into the world, what happens to it, no dictionary can keep up with. It can’t possibly contain what a word means between Heather and me, inside a family, within a profession, or to somebody because of something that happened twenty years ago. Dictionaries tend to treat language as frozen in the amber of time, never to change, never to budge an inch. Great idea, but then you look at a dictionary and find the definition of Moo is: to make the deep, low sound characteristic of a cow. That’s not how I’m using it, but that’s what the bookstore woman assumed. And, if you’re a computer whiz, MOO stands for Mud, Object-Oriented. It is a type of virtual reality system or text-based collaborative software where users can interact, chat, and build programmable spaces. The bookstore woman didn’t upbraid me for calling Heather a computer program; that wasn’t in her lexicon.
Language is constantly accumulating private definitions and cultural leanings. We don’t just learn a language; we spend our lives modifying it.
Context Is Doing More Work Than We Think
When you think about it, moo doesn’t mean anything by itself. If you’ve never seen or heard of a cow, if you didn’t have that speak-and-say toy where you pull the string and a voice says: “A cow says moo.” You may never know what the word moo means. Without context, it’s just three letters standing alone, like a cow in a field.
The dictionary gives it a definition, but the dictionary doesn’t give it your definition. Heather does. Our friendship does. Twenty years of whatever ridiculousness has passed between the two of us does. The bookstore, the text arriving in the morning, the coffee, the county fair I barely remember, and every Moo exchanged since then have been quietly adding meaning to the word. That’s context doing the heavy lifting. The weird thing about context is, we only notice it when it fails.
When Heather says “Moo,” I don’t stop and process what she means. There’s no translation happening. But the bookstore woman suddenly exposes the machinery by removing the shared context. Now everybody is using the same word, but meaning collapses.
A sentence spoken inside one culture can land differently inside another. A joke that works among people who’ve known each other for thirty years can sound vicious to someone overhearing it. In theatrical writing, we use this to establish time and depth of a relationship. Look no further than The Big Bang Theory. Those guys bust on each other all the time. We don’t need to know the history; we just know, from their interactions, that there IS history. Which leads to: something perfectly understood inside an industry can sound ridiculous or even cruel outside it.
And this isn’t limited to friends, husbands and wives, and co-workers. Businesses, companies, and brands have lexicons too.
Your Customer Wasn’t in the Meeting
Companies spend months together. They have meetings, Slack conversations, presentations, research, and endless discussions. Gradually, without realizing it, they create a private language, just as Heather and I did. Then somebody writes: We’re a human-centered, purpose-driven company transforming the future through meaningful innovation. Everyone in the conference room nods because they know what all of that means. They’ve spent six months building the context. The customer arrives Tuesday morning. They haven’t read the lexicon.
Suddenly, your entire company is back outside the bookstore.
A brand puts enormous pressure on language to carry an entire internal understanding across a gap to someone who possesses none of the context that created it. That is a recipe for disaster. My grandmother had one of those recipes; she used to make it for holidays. We all ate it and drank copious amounts of bourbon. You’ll probably need that bourbon once you’ve dropped your human-centered idea on a client who’s never been in a single meeting. They don’t understand where the idea came from, the months of trial and error, or the A/B testing that brought it to fruition. They are now the woman berating me for calling my female friend a cow. She wasn’t in the twenty-year-long meeting either.
You Don’t Get to Decide What They Hear
Let’s start with the uncomfortable reality that intention isn’t the same thing as communication. I know what I meant may be completely true, but it doesn’t solve anything if the person across from me heard something else. The bookstore woman is the comic extreme of this. I knew exactly what Moo meant. Heather knew exactly what Moo meant. That didn’t prevent someone else from hearing an insult.
Once language leaves us, it has two authors: the person who said it and the person who heard it. You don’t have to argue that every interpretation is equally reasonable. Bookstore woman was clearly bringing a fairly substantial cloud of her own baggage to three innocent letters. But her reaction demonstrates that meaning can’t be controlled entirely at the point of origin.
We put tremendous pressure on words to arrive intact. We expect what we mean to somehow travel inside them, survive the journey, and emerge in another person’s head exactly as we packed it. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, the results are anyone’s guess. To me, Moo was just the way I spoke to my oldest friend. To this nosy woman, I had insulted an entire sex; a huge swath of life had been insulted by three letters, given breath, made sound. The pressure on me, on her, and on Heather is insurmountable, if you think about it. What we expect those three letters to do is almost impossible.
This goes for brands as well. A brand can carefully choose a word because it means something specific internally. But the audience doesn’t receive the internal definition along with it.
If a company calls itself innovative, customers don’t hear the meetings that produced that word. They compare it against every company that has called itself innovative before. If you say family, premium, authentic, community, or disruptive, you’re stepping into language that already has fingerprints all over it. The brand contributes meaning, but it doesn’t start with a clean page.
I’m not arguing that brands therefore need safe, sterile language nobody could possibly misunderstand. That would kill the entire point. Ambiguity isn’t necessarily bad. Private language isn’t bad. Personality certainly isn’t bad. In fact, Moo works precisely because it’s peculiar.
The lesson is simply that communication requires some humility. Before asking only, “What are we trying to say?” we should also ask, “What might someone hear?” Not because we can anticipate every possible interpretation, but because recognizing the gap makes us better communicators. Understanding isn’t something the speaker can manufacture alone.
We can choose the word. We can provide context. We can listen when somebody tells us what they heard. We can clarify when necessary. But somewhere between the mouth and the ear, or the brand and the customer, meaning becomes a shared construction. How you share it shapes your client communication.
The Takeaway
Language asks an awful lot of us. We use it to explain ourselves, sell ideas, make promises, build relationships, tell people who we are, and occasionally call our best friend a cow without meaning anything remotely insulting. Then we send those words out into the world and hope they arrive carrying what we intended. Most of the time, remarkably, they do. But every person who receives them adds something of their own, and that’s the part we can’t completely control.
For brands, that’s worth remembering. At ThoughtLab, we spend a great deal of time thinking about words because words don’t land on an empty page. Your customers already have experiences with the language you’re using. They’ve heard the promises before. They have their own definitions, associations, suspicions, and memories. Good communication doesn’t ignore all of that and simply speak louder. It respects the distance between what you mean and what someone else might hear, then works to shrink that distance a little.
Maybe that’s all we can ask language to do. We can’t make every word mean precisely the same thing to everyone, and I don’t think we’d want to. Language would become terribly dull if we stripped away everything peculiar, personal, and wonderfully inexplicable about it. Some words become richer because they belong differently to different people.
Which brings me back to Moo. To a dictionary, it’s the sound a cow makes. To a computer programmer, it can mean something else entirely. To one woman outside a bookstore, it was apparently grounds for knocking my teeth down my throat. But when my phone lights up in the morning, and I see those three letters from Heather, I know exactly what they mean. No confusion, no pressure to explain any of it.
I just write back: Moo.
