Exactitude and the parts of an elephant

I have a fondness for precise usage of words to communicate exactly what I wish to express, and as a tool in understanding the meaning of what others are saying.

This morning as I left my driveway, I heard on the radio the forecast for today, "Highs in the mid-60's to mid-80's," apparently hedging their bets. Having lived here for a number of years, I know that in reality, the range of highs varies that much within the radio station's listening area due to coastal and other influences. But there's no room in a sound bite for such detail, and so the range-one must have an understanding of where their location fits in the range to have an idea of how warm it might get come mid-afternoon. If I relied on the radio for weather forecasts, I might be frustrated by the inexact nature of their information.

My focus on precision is useful to describe things like my visceral response to certain behaviors, or the nuances present in an unconventional relationship. Or the look on the face of the man sitting on the bench with all his worldly possessions gathered close, or the openness and pure delight of a young child's face whose life view has not yet been tempered by the realities of human behavior.  Would that I could describe such things with clarity and exactly the right words to shade the verbal picture with meaning that arrests the listener.

Alas, I cannot.  And even if I could, it turns out that there is no exact calibration tool to assess what meaning each of us assigns to a given word, even from within the same cultural and socioeconomic setting. We must rely on imprecise tools such as synonyms, and while we can get close to certainty, we can never arrive.

That inability to know with certainty that we both mean the same thing when we agree on the use of a word may in part be the source of misunderstandings, but I believe that it's also an essential element of the diversity that creates beauty and the resulting opportunity for discovery.  Like the blind men who each felt a different part of the elephant, we all understand what we understand.  It's in the telling, and listening, that we find there are more parts to the elephant than we knew.  This awareness of our ignorance is the only avenue to expanding our elephant knowledge. We will never know all the aspects of the elephant, but we do better if we try.