Easy-to-process things feel truer, safer, and more appealing.
More quotesA stranger at a railway station says, “Leave the bag with me.” You grip the handle. A uniformed guard says the same thing and you may hand it over. Five words have remained perfectly still while their meaning has sprinted across the platform.
We pretend messages are little sealed containers, sent by a speaker and opened intact by an audience. They are closer to ingredients. The listener adds motive, reputation, authority, history and whatever happened last time somebody made that promise. “A little rebellion” carries Jefferson’s associations or Lenin’s before anyone has debated the grammar. “We are simplifying” sounds different from the person losing a job and the person approving the savings. Even silence changes meaning according to who can afford it.
This makes the business obsession with polishing words faintly comic. A distrusted institution hires a copywriter to make its claim warmer, then adds soft music and a person rolling up their sleeves. The audience, irritatingly, continues to notice the institution. Authenticity comes from accumulated plausibility, and no adjective can be made to do that heavy lifting before lunch.
Sometimes a customer can carry the claim. Sometimes an engineer, independent result or visible act can. Sometimes the only credible messenger is time. The interesting question arrives when nobody believable can say the sentence yet. Is that a communications problem—or has communication just caught the strategy lying?