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Image-referent Confusion

I have great trouble decoding hints, implicit meanings, and rhetorical questions.  Such great trouble in fact that it appreciably affects my ability to communicate well.  Nonetheless, I understand the concept of indirect language.  I know that people don't always say exactly what they mean.  What I don't often know is why or how to tell when they might be doing so.  I am only well equipped to handle the very clear, the glaringly obvious.  When communicating with me anything less than directness is a bad gamble.

I'm continually surprised by how often people hide what they mean behind little language puzzles.  One can find people hiding even when there's no need to hide.  It seems to me that directness is perceived by many as rude, even on the smallest scale and in situations in which nothing is at stake.

Obfuscation becomes second nature.  I will try to understand even when there's no hope that I will.  I've had to learn to ask for clarification, and I'm still not good at it.  My pride is only one impediment.  Another is what I call image-referent confusion.  Put simply: often people who haven't said what they mean will believe that they have, apparently because they mistake the implication of something for the thing which is implied.  Take for example a thinly veiled threat of the kind that's common in fiction: "It'd be a shame if something happened to your family" might mean "I will hurt your family if you don't do what I want," but the two statements are not identical.  One (the image) represents the other (the referent).  Conflating the image with the referent, one might assume that the two statements are literally the same and might thus be unable to clarify thar one means the other if called upon to do so.

This is a subtle and complex problem.  I've never seen it described by anyone else, and people I describe it to often have difficulty understanding my description.  Perhaps I'm bad at describing it.  Or perhaps I'm not observing what I think I'm observing.  I'm certainly no expert in human communication.  I'm the opposite.  Perceptive and attentive as I might be, there are realms of neurotypy I can never enter.  I don't like to speculate, but I like even less being hopelessly confused.  And there's a lot about neurotypical people, particularly relating to communication, that neurotypical people themselves are just as unable to explain as I am to understand.

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