The other day I had a conversation with my Nana, my brother, and my mom. We found ourselves offering words and observing our subtle differences in our understandings of what those words meant.

As a kid I thought one of the hardest jobs in the world was writing the definitions for words in a dictionary. To be honest, I still do. After that conversation with my family, I have even more appreciation for dictionaries and the people who write them.

Discipline, perseverance, struggle, acceptance, denial, contentment.

What do those words mean to you? I believe that your understanding of them is like a fingerprint, entirely unique to you.

In talking with three of the people closest to me, and by extension, most similar to me, I found that none of us agreed fully on a single word definition. In trying to explain what we thought something meant, we ended up defaulting to using synonyms and describing connotations.

This is where dictionaries come in. They form a baseline upon which we can all agree on. Often, they give us an initial understanding of a word, which we then deepen and shape with our realities and experiences.

In practical reality, however, none of us are talking strictly using the baselines. We live in our own unique realities and can only understand words in the context of those realities.

I have a new theory: we can triangulate other people’s unique understanding of a word so that we can understand what they’re really saying.

For example, we can ask clarifying questions with synonyms or ask about their emotional connotation. By using similar words, we can see what someone’s understanding of a word is more like and less like. This still feels very abstract to try and explain. Let me ground it in a more specifical example:

Think of the word perseverance and what it means to you. In order for me to really know what you think it means, I might ask if it’s more like discipline or persistence. Does perseverance mean making it through a struggle, or does it mean sticking to something until it’s done? Or take struggle, for example. Is struggle good or bad? Does it imply challenges or obstacles? Is it something you can choose to do or is it something forced upon you?

Through “triangulating” I can figure out what you mean when you say perseverance or struggle, and how that’s different from my understanding of it.

I fear that taking the time to understand someone else’s words so deeply and intricately is not something that happens often. It’s hard and takes time, and it can be unnecessary or distracting from the main point. But I do think it should happen more than it does - I have a feeling it would resolve a lot of miscommunication or prevent it in the first place.