capacity to perceive accurately.
3.7 I can explain how gender affects perceptions of me and others. □Gender preferences contribute to our adopting different standpoints, perceiving different realities, and having different expectations set for us. They also lead to our exhibiting different communication behaviors.
3.8 I can explain how culture affects perceptions of me and others. □We view reality through a cultural lens that biases us toward our own culture. This can precipitate cultural nearsightedness and serve as a barrier to self–other understanding.
3.9 I can analyze how media and technology influence perceptions of me and others. □According to critics, we learn the stereotypes and skewed images of reality that media, including social media, present to us. Digital and social media raise a host of perception-based issues about the nature of our identity and our ability to identify what is truthful.
3.10 I can use communication skills to improve the accuracy of self-perception, perception of others, and perception of events. □We increase our perceptual abilities when we recognize that perceptual processes are personally based, take the time we need to process information about ourselves, others, and events fairly and objectively; and try to become more open to change. By watching ourselves in action, learning how others perceive us, and committing to self-growth, we improve our self-awareness.
Become a Word Master
attribution theory 54
closure 51
cultivation theory 75
distinctiveness theory 73
empathy 70
facework 64
fact 69
figure–ground principle 51
grit 55
high self-monitors 64
impression management 63
inference 69
Johari window 61
low self-monitors 64
perception 48
perceptual sets 65
predicted outcome value theory 66
prejudice 67
Pygmalion effect 59
selective attention 49
selective exposure 49
selective perception 49
selective retention 49
self-awareness 52
self-concept 53
self-disclosure 61
self-esteem 53
self-fulfilling prophecy 58
self-image 53
stereotype 67
stigma 58
unconscious bias 67
4 Communicating With Words: Helping Minds Meet
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After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
4.1 Define language, and explain the triangle of meaning.
4.2 Explain the factors at work in the communication of meaning.
4.3 Identify problems experienced when attempting to share meaning, including patterns of miscommunication.
4.4 Discuss the relationship between culture and language.
4.5 Discuss the relationship between gender and language.
4.6 Explain how power affects language use.
4.7 Explain how incivility affects language use.
4.8 Analyze how technology influences language use.
4.9 Apply techniques for improving language skills.
Whatever we call a thing, whatever we say it is, it is not. For whatever we say is words, and words are words and not things. The words are maps, and the map is not the territory.
Harry L. Weinberg
In the film Arrival, a linguist stands inside a spaceship separated from two aliens by a glass-like partition. She approaches the aliens, placing her palm against the partition. Her plan to save Earth from presumed annihilation is to communicate with them. Their language, she realizes, is unlike ours. It is based on a nonlinear perception of time, a perception she was able to gather by listening, empathizing, and talking. The linguist used words—not weapons—to save the world.1
Language is Alive: We Use Words to Share Meaning
The English language contains over 1 million words, and a new word enters the vocabulary about every 98 minutes. In 2015, the Oxford Dictionaries named as its “word of the year” an emoji titled “face with tears of joy.” They say that for the first time they recognized a pictograph as word of the year because of the symbol’s ability to transcend linguistic borders.2 In 2016, their new word of the year was post-truth—a term signifying that appeals to emotion and personal belief are more important than objective facts when it comes to being able to influence us. A contender, but not the winner, was chatbot—a computer program that engages in conversation with human users.3 What do these choices say about the value we place on words or verbal language?
We depend on words to help us share meaning. By understanding how language works, we can improve our ability to do that. In this chapter, we define language and explore the roots of miscommunication. We consider how aspects of our society affect our word choices and conclude with guidelines for developing our ability to make word choices that help others understand us. Although most Americans know about 20,000 words, each of us actually uses only about 7,500 of them on any given day.4 On what basis do we choose our words? And what happens when we select the wrong ones?
Words, Things, and Thoughts
Language is a unified system of symbols that permits the sharing of meaning. A symbol stands for, or represents, something else. Words are symbols, and thus words represent things. Notice
