The injustice and unfairness bother Sarah’s mind like discordant jazz played loud, and as her nerve endings frazzle, she resolves to do something about it. Perhaps not until the colour and heat of her feelings have settled into a softer spectrum of understanding from white-hot to mellow, she decides. But in the meantime, she needs to share it with others and picks up her pen.
‘She’s only here to observe,’ Sarah knew she had told them this, and written it in her email about her student’s pending visit. But somehow the verb ‘to observe’ had been misconstrued, misheard, or ignored, and her student was given menial tasks to do, told to answer the phone, then unfairly judged, found wanting and was reported. This was never the intended positive outcome of the office visit they had carefully set goals for over the previous weeks. They were both left mystified, and not just a little cross and upset.
Somehow, Sarah felt that she had let her student down… so she set herself the task of trying to understand where it had all gone wrong. Not enough emphasis on ‘to observe’ perhaps? What would be a better word to use than observe? See, watch, perceive, discern, note, detect are all synonyms of observe, but none really fitted the bill. ‘Observe’ it must be, Sarah thought…unless? With the thought bubble expanding in her head, it occurred to her that she could have utilised (syn: used, employed, put into service), ‘Show, don’t Tell’ principles in her communications! Maybe she could have extrapolated (meaning: extended the application to an unknown situation by assuming that existing trends will continue), which could have allowed her student to sit and watch so she could think about what is happening and form her own conclusions about what she sees. Unfortunately, ‘conclusions’ could also have been a problem word, Sarah soon realised, as some synonyms for conclusions include: ends, closures, terminations, interpretations, deductions, and inferences.
‘Oh dear,’ Sarah thought, with her wrangling mind quieter and calmer, ‘now I have a complicated, long, and cumbersome (late Middle English word meaning slow, or complicated), sentence which reads:
“She is here to watch. Allow her to sit quietly on a comfortable black chair with her knees crossed, (oxford comma) at the back of the office space which will be well lit so she can see clearly. She will then think about what she sees, form an opinion, and transfer it to her mind to use as she wants in any unknown situation, at any time in the future just so long as everything remains the same,’”
As Sarah wrote, she became aware that perhaps her sarcastic tone might be taken as infra dig (syn: demeaning) and the best action would be to stop overworking (syn: exploiting) this problem and just locate an alternative venue (syn: spot, place or in this instance, a friendly community space), for her student to observe―yes, to actually ‘observe’―phone answering and the filing of A4 pieces of paper for two hours.
Sometimes, Sarah mused as her exasperation receded and the colour of her mood softened, it is just a word that makes all the difference in mutual understanding and a great deal of difference to whether one’s time is well-used or wasted. And, when all is said and done, she concluded, a little humour, with or without the satire, helps to lower the heat too.
But how-on-earth, Sarah still puzzled to herself, can we be sure that we all understand the same meaning of a word or of anything at all really, whether spoken or written? But that is a matter for consideration at another time, she finally decided.