Thanks to a hemorrhagic stroke, my father suffered from aphasia in the last years of his life. He struggled to find and pronounce words, and we struggled to interpret what he said.

During that time, we learned some interesting things about the way the brain processes language. Sometimes, for example, he would start a word correctly but finish it incorrectly. “It’s diplomatic,” he would say—instead of difficult—when he explained that he had a hard time getting from his wheelchair to his bed.

Sometimes he would come out with an entirely unrelated word: “I like to read the flowers,” as he indicated a copy of the New York Times.

And sometimes he would be so close, so very close, and yet still miss the mark. One day he left me a phone message: “This is your son, this is your son,” he chanted. This one short message revealed volumes to me about the unheralded complexity of our language.

He knew who he was. He knew that I was related to him. He knew we had a parent-child relationship, and he knew that he was a male relative. It was the very last piece, the information about whether he was the male parent or the male child, that eluded him.

I understood him, of course. I understood him because I knew him and I loved him and I cared enough to decipher what he was trying to say.

My ability-impaired father was not, of course, the target market for the many semantic technologies being dangled in front of us like virtual carrots. But his is not the only situation that requires human attention, presence or love to understand.

Consider my project manager friend, who confessed to me, “The problem is that I responded to the client’s expressed need rather than to the client’s actual need.” What we need and what we explicitly seek are often two different things.

When someone whom you love has had a stroke and tells you that getting into bed is diplomatic, it’s pretty easy to figure out that there’s something else going on. In the absence of such obvious signs, however, it’s easy to make assumptions about how well you understand someone or how well you are understood.

Do not close your ears to those around you. Give them your attention, your presence and your love. Listen with your ears, with your eyes, with your mind, and with your heart, so that you will know if a wayward flower has crept in where a newspaper ought to be.

Please believe me when I say you will never regret the effort this sort of communication requires.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 5:38 am and is filed under People matter, Semantic Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.