Interpersonal Communication- A Mindful Approach to Relationships, 2020a

Broadway play together. You ask them “how the play was,” and here’s how the first friend responded:
So, we got to the theatre 20 minutes early to ensure we were able to get comfortable and could do some
people watching before the show started. The person sitting in front of us had the worst comb-over I had
ever seen. Halfway through Act 1, the hair was flopping back in our laps like the legs of a spider. I mean,
those strands of hair had to be 8 to 9 inches long and came down on us like it was pleading with us to
rescue it. Oh, and this one woman who was sitting to our right was wearing this huge fur hat-turban thing
on her head. It looked like some kind of furry animal crawled up on her head and died. I felt horrible
for the poor guy that was sitting behind her because I’m sure he couldn’t see anything over or around that
thing.
Here’s is how your second friend described the experience:
I thought the play was good enough. It had some guy from the UK who tried to have a Brooklyn accent
that came in and out. The set was pretty cool though. At one point, the set turned from a boring looking
office building into a giant tree. That was pretty darn cool. As for the overall story, it was good, I guess.
The show just wasn’t something I would normally see.
In this case, you have the same experience described by two different people. We are only talking
about the experience each person had in an abstract sense. In both cases, you had friends reporting on
the same experience but from their perceptions of the experience. With your first friend, you learn more
about what was going on around your friend in the theatre but not about the show itself. The second
friend provided you with more details about her perception of the play, the acting, the scenery, and the
story. Did we learn anything about the content of the “play” through either conversation? Not really.
Many of our conversations resemble this type of experience recall. In both cases, we have two
individuals who are attempting to share with us through communication specific ideas and meanings.
However, sharing meaning is not always very easy. In both cases, you asked your friends, “how the play
was.” In the first case, your friend interpreted this phrase as being asked about their experience at the
theatre itself. In the second case, your friend interpreted your phrase as being a request for her opinion
or critique of the play. As you can see in this example, it’s easy to get very different responses based on
how people interpret what you are asking.
Communication scholars often say that “meanings aren’t in words, they’re in people” because of this
issue related to interpretation. Yes, there are dictionary definitions of words. Earlier in this chapter, we
provided three different dictionary-type definitions for the word “love:” 1) intense regard or liking, 2) a
deeply intimate relationship, or 3) a romantic/sexual attachment. These types of definitions we often call
. However, it’s important to understand that in addition to denotative definitions,
there are also or the emotions or associations a person makes when
exposed to a symbol. For example, how one personally understands or experiences the word “love” is
connotative. The warm feeling you get, the memories of experiencing love, all come together to give you
a general, personalized understanding of the word itself. One of the biggest problems that occur is when
one person’s denotative meaning conflicts with another person’s connotative meaning. For example,
when I write the word “dog,” many of you think of four-legged furry family members. If you’ve never
been a dog owner, you may just generally think about these animals as members of the canine family.
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