Words and Conversations

There’s an old standard gag in sitcoms (it may date back to Vaudeville, I don’t know) where two people are having a having a conversation about two different things, but they both think that they are talking about the same thing. One my favorite examples of this was done on a show called Barney Miller about thirty years ago. The title character was a police captain in charge of the detectives in the12th precinct of New York City. One of the characters in the show was a Detective Fish, played by Abe Vigoda, who must have been the oldest detective on the New York City police force (in fact, Fish was forced to retire during the show’s run). Frequently on the show they would touch on his health problems. In one episode, Barney discovers that they have rats in the building, and calls an exterminator. When the exterminator shows up, he seems like somebody that should have retired a long time ago. While the exterminator is doing his inspection, a call comes in, and everyone leaves, except Fish. Fish gets a call from his doctor; some test results have come back, and they think that Fish may have kidney stones. They want to do more tests to see how big the stones are, to determine the best course of treatment. While Fish is on the phone, the exterminator finishes his inspection, and comes to make his report. He waits at a respectful distance until Fish hangs up the phone, and then sidles up and says, “You’ve got quite a problem.” Of course, Fish, getting off the phone hearing about kidney stones, thinks that this other man is addressing his kidney stone problem, instead of the rats. “Don’t I know it,” Fish says, and sizing up the other man, “I suppose you’ve seen this sort of thing before?” “Oh, sure, many times.” “What’s it like?” “Well, when they’re small, they come, they go, you don’t even notice, but when they’re big, they’ll tear you apart.” The look on Abe Vigoda’s face is pure comedy gold.
Of course, that’s a sitcom, that could never happen in real life. Couldn’t it? We have a tendency to develop filters. We don’t mean to, and often we aren’t even aware that we have done it, but, like Pavlov’s dog, we end up with trained responses. Certain words or phrases will set us off, because of associations that the other person may not even be aware of. Sometimes, as in the example above, what should have been obvious (the exterminator is talking about the problem that he was hired to assess and take are of) isn’t so obvious, because a recent experience is affecting our thought processes (getting a phone call about a medical problem makes it hard to think about anything else for awhile). I was at a worship service once where a visitor showed up, and it was obvious that he had been drinking. The pastor asked us to sing, “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” and this visitor stood up. It was fairly obvious to me that he heard the words, “Stand up” and thought he was supposed to stand up. It was equally obvious to the pastor, having done a lot of street evangelism, and having had to deal with less-than-sober people in his services, that this man thought he had something to say. The pastor told this man to sit down, that he wasn’t going to let him speak, the man looked absolutely dumbfounded. He opened his mouth to explain or to argue, and the pastor had him thrown out. Now, I will admit that I may have misread the situation; maybe this guy really intended to disrupt our worship services, but it looked to me like he just didn’t really understand what was going on. And by the way, if you think that I’m blaming the pastor for his reaction, keep in mind that I might have been able to resolve the situation more amicably if I had pointed out what the situation looked like to me, but I didn’t.
I think that we all need to strive for understanding, and we need to work at getting our own personal little connotations get in the way. What someone says, doesn’t always mean what we think it means, and sometimes we allow ourselves to get upset before we understand what they meant, and that just makes it all the more difficult.