As with gestures, most words have multiple meanings.

“Shut up!” in one setting means “Stop talking,” and in another the same words mean “I’m amazed by what you just said.” Context, including tone of voice, guides the listener to (or at least toward) the intended meaning.

Context includes occasion, speaker, audience, gesture, tone, etc., to provide nuance leading to correct understanding.

Everyone who ever sent a complex email to multiple recipients in a business setting has learned how ambiguous language can be. Emails are often inherently ambiguous, since they are a poor medium for communicating tone, irony, humor or any other nuance.

Everyone listening to a symphony hears a different performance, as exemplified by a great scene in Forster’s Howard’s End (with thanks to a recent article in The New Yorker for reminding me of this scene).

In the movie Mean Girls, Cady (played by Lindsay Lohan) is asked why she likes math, and she answers “because it’s the same everywhere.” You know better than I do if that is an accurate description of the universal language of mathematics.

My boss for much of my working life always wanted to move past words as quickly as possible and get to the numbers. He’d read my report and say, “How much are we talking about?” He correctly interpreted my shrug and upturned palms as, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” never “I don’t care.” Context gave nuanced meaning to the multi-purpose gesture.