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S i d e b a r
Words Don’t Always Mean What We Think
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This Rock
Volume 18, Number 9
 November 2007 
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When I was a college student studying in Rome, I had an experience that reveals this kind of confusion with language. I was riding on a train in Italy. Across from me in our compartment was a young Italian woman in her 20s. We struck up a conversation in Italian. My Italian was good enough to carry on a conversation for a while. I knew simple phrases and basic grammar, but I was at a loss to talk about any subject that required a large vocabulary. After an hour or so of talking, the Italian woman suggested that we switch to English. She explained that she had studied English for three years in high school, but that she had never had the opportunity to speak English with a native English speaker. I gladly agreed.
Her first words to me in English were quite puzzling. She asked me, "Are you strange?"
I was stunned. Up to that point, I thought that we were having a very friendly and enjoyable conversation in Italian. I interpreted her to be asking if I was weird or unusual.
As I was thinking about how to respond, it dawned on me that, in Italian, a straniero is a stranger, that is, a foreigner, or someone from a different country. She was asking if I came from I different country. I was relieved.
This confusion in communication wasn’t the result of our speaking two different languages. We were both speaking English. But she was using words in English to mean one thing, and I was interpreting them to mean something else.
Consider also the humorous example of King George I. He is said to have told architect Christopher Wren that his masterpiece, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, was "awful and artificial." Today, we interpret this as an insult. It sounds like the King was saying that the architect’s work was terrible and phony. But in the context of the early 18th century, "awful" meant awe-inspiring, and "artificial" meant "full of great art"!
So, to avoid confusion, it is important that we become aware that terms in English can have multiple meanings. This is a pervasive feature, not only of modern English, but also of life in the modern world generally. Every major modern language faces this problem. As the Second Vatican Council states, "the very words by which key concepts are expressed take on quite different meanings in diverse ideological systems" (Gaudium et Spes 4).
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