Mind Your Meaning

Definition

Ordinary sentences carry many latent readings, and people routinely assume everyone present shares their own reading — an assumption that fails often enough to be expensive. Because "mere quantity of effort" spent writing more carefully or reading more carefully doesn't reliably fix this, the book prescribes an active social process instead: "ONCE YOU HAVE A PROBLEM STATEMENT IN WORDS, PLAY WITH THE WORDS UNTIL THE STATEMENT IS IN EVERYONE'S HEAD" — a deliberate practice of word games rather than a one-time proofread.

In the Book

A program specification stating "the exception information will be in the XYZ file, too" was read by its writer as "the XYZ file is one more place this information appears" (implying duplication existed elsewhere) and by the programmer as "another kind of information the XYZ file holds is exception information" (implying no duplication) — the gap cost roughly $500,000 in unrecoverable data before anyone noticed the two readings diverged. The book demonstrates the fix on the sentence "Mary had a little lamb": stressing each word in turn produces a different implied meaning (not John's lamb; doesn't have it anymore; not several; not a big one), and running "had" through a dictionary's 31 listed definitions turns the innocent sentence into open comedy. From this the book compiles a "Golden List of Word Games" — swap MAY for MUST, AND for OR, SOME for EVERY, replace a defined term with its explicit definition everywhere it appears, replace persuasive words like OBVIOUSLY with the argument they're standing in for — as reusable tools to run against any problem statement before committing resources to it.

Why It Matters

Ambiguity in a stated problem is invisible from the inside — everyone silently substitutes their own most natural reading and feels no friction until the divergent readings collide downstream, often after money has already been spent in the wrong direction. Treating word choice as something to actively probe, using small mechanical transformations rather than trusting careful reading, converts a latent disagreement into a visible, cheap-to-resolve one before it becomes an expensive, hard-to-trace one.