Word play with Wittgenstein

How much of the mess we make of our lives is down to poor communication? We probably already know the answer to this question and much ink has been spilled in the giving of self-help advice about how to do better in this regard. Perhaps Wittgenstein’s greatest contribution is in helping us to use words better, as well as interpreting the language of others in its proper context more successfully. More often than we realize, we talk at cross purposes and are thinking of quite different things when using even those words that we may imagine are relatively uncomplicated, like ‘fairness’ and ‘love’. Having the wisdom to not assume that you are actually understanding someone else, or being understood by them, would certainly save most of us a lot of upset, time and probably even money (even though deconstructing conversations is not always such a joyful thing). An added awareness that language is a kind of contextual game, with its own rules and conventions, also enables us to understand more deeply that people often do not mean what they actually say and invites us to get better at seeing what’s really going on, beneath the surface meaning of the words we sometimes choose to hide behind.