A friend wrote me privately and gave me permission to post this here:
"A few years ago I was getting a haircut in Rochester. I told the hairdresser I wanted to get it cut before leaving the country. She asked where I was going. I said - perhaps not very clearly - "Moscow." Which led her to ask, "Do you speak Spanish?"
When I tell this anecdote to German or Russian friends, they put it down to legendary American ignorance. That's also what I took it to be for a while. Somehow, though, that didn't feel like a sufficient explanation.
I thought back to the continuation of the conversation in the barber shop. It turned out that the hairdresser's boyfriend was from Mexico. In retrospect, I think that's a key fact.
It had likely never happened to her before that that a customer had said he was going to Moscow, but people she knew went to Mexico - as she was perhaps also thinking of doing.
We all have horizons of expectation – and if we experience something that does not fit into the horizon, we tend to interpret it so that it does fit. When I mumbled "Moscow," that was literally unbelievable to her ears, so she figured I must have said "Mexico." She took what was nonsense from her POV and turned it into sense.
Probably relatively few errors are caused by simple ignorance. More are caused by the incorrect interpretation of possible meanings."
A friend wrote me privately and gave me permission to post this here:
"A few years ago I was getting a haircut in Rochester. I told the hairdresser I wanted to get it cut before leaving the country. She asked where I was going. I said - perhaps not very clearly - "Moscow." Which led her to ask, "Do you speak Spanish?"
When I tell this anecdote to German or Russian friends, they put it down to legendary American ignorance. That's also what I took it to be for a while. Somehow, though, that didn't feel like a sufficient explanation.
I thought back to the continuation of the conversation in the barber shop. It turned out that the hairdresser's boyfriend was from Mexico. In retrospect, I think that's a key fact.
It had likely never happened to her before that that a customer had said he was going to Moscow, but people she knew went to Mexico - as she was perhaps also thinking of doing.
We all have horizons of expectation – and if we experience something that does not fit into the horizon, we tend to interpret it so that it does fit. When I mumbled "Moscow," that was literally unbelievable to her ears, so she figured I must have said "Mexico." She took what was nonsense from her POV and turned it into sense.
Probably relatively few errors are caused by simple ignorance. More are caused by the incorrect interpretation of possible meanings."