WorkLore

As someone who couldn’t make up her mind what to study in undergrad, I took a double degree – science and literature. 

People often asked me how I could study two subjects that were so different. 

But really. They weren’t.

Yes, they had language that they used to convey and create new knowledge. And yes, I had to learn to speak both, which is why the limerick above got me thinking about overlapping languages. 

Because “81” can be expressed through the mathematical equation above. But it can also be written out in language. (There, I saved you doing the math yourself.)

How many times do we have to speak a different language, or express things differently for different audiences? 

We speak to our family one way, our boss another, our clients differently yet again, and our neighbour yet another way. Because our relationship to the message we are conveying might be the same, but the language our audience understands might be different. 

When you find your communication falling flat, do you think about the code you were using? Do you try again in a different one? 

How often does our communication fail because we didn’t switch into the right language for the audience we were addressing? 

I suspect it’s quite often. What do you think?