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One of the most frequently quoted passages in the Bible, especially at funerals, is the 23rd Psalm. It comforts those who are mourning, reassuring them of God’s presence even through life’s most difficult times.
Except that’s not how I understood it growing up.
In fact, I took it in the exact opposite way. Phrase-for-phrase and verse-for-verse. Let me break it down:
What It Says
What I Heard
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want
To me this whole passage was about a mean shepherd that I don’t want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.
It’s like being taunted. Green pastures are for running and playing, not laying in. Still waters are for swimming not walking beside.
Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies
Why would the table be prepared there? Prepare it someplace safer.
My cup runneth over
Why would you keep pouring until the cup overflowed, making a mess. This would get me in trouble, plus now I have to clean the floor.
You get the idea. The rest was kind of a blur, which I guess means that it was OK. Probably didn’t matter, though, because I’d already totally missed the point. My eight-year-old brain was surely taking it all far too literally. I get it now, but I still have vivid memories of thinking about it in that way.
Looking back, the completeness of my misunderstanding is sort of impressive.
It wasn’t just Bible verses. Song lyrics, too. I suspect that everybody mishears song lyrics. If we can’t make them out or place them into some meaningful context, our brains fill in the blanks. As I was writing this article, I wondered if there was a word defined as “a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it new meaning.” It turns out that there is: mondegreen. It was coined by American writer Sylvia Wright in 1954 in an essay where she described, as a child, mishearing the phrase “And laid him on the green” as “And Lady Mondegreen.”
Here are a few that I remember from my childhood:
Steve Miller Band’s Fly Like an Eagle was particularly problematic. He sang, “Shoe the children, with no shoes on their feet.” I heard, “Shoo the children with those shoes on their feet.” It made sense. My brother and I weren’t allowed in the house with our shoes on, tracking mud from outside all over the carpet. Take off those shoes before you come inside! Next line, “House the people living in the street.” I heard, “How’s the people living in the street,” as in, “How they doing?” and “Say ‘hi’ for me!”
There was “One toe over the line sweet Jesus” about a person standing too close to the edge of a subway platform. “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, baddest man in the whole downtown” because my swear word repertoire had not yet blossomed by the summer of 1973. And I had no idea why a lady would be compared to a brick house. I grew up in a brick house. I liked my house. They must have liked the girl.
My wife, Karen, suffers from that same affliction, sharing in what may be the greatest lyrical misinterpretation of all time: hearing the Beatles sing about “The girl with colitis goes by.”
One of my favorite workshop icebreaker games has participants playing in pairs. Your partner holds their hand out, palm up, while you tap a well-known song into it. Baa, Baa Black Sheep. Happy Birthday. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Jingle Bells. Something like that. It’s extremely rare for the receiving partner to correctly guess it. Why aren’t they getting it? You’re hearing the song perfectly in your own mind’s ear. Your partner is receiving the information exactly as you’re sending it. But they’re not getting the message. They’re not hearing in their head what you’re hearing in your head.
Clarity isn’t about what you send, it’s about what the other person understands.
Something that’s clear to one person can be completely misunderstood by another when they don’t have the benefit of context. The same problem shows up in data.
Data Product definitions, context, and expected content must be clear and complete because people who are not you are going to use them.
That’s why it’s often hard to proofread your own writing. It’s better to run a draft past someone unfamiliar with the subject to gauge your clarity. I did that with the introductory chapters of my dissertation. The goal was for those who didn’t know about fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms to come away with a basic working understanding after reading them.
Share your Data Product metadata with others and see if they interpret it the same way that you do. You might be surprised by how much unspoken context you’re bringing into them. That unspoken context needs to be spoken for your Data Products to be understood and used properly.
What are the components of net_revenue_amount? In many companies, Marketing, Sales, and Finance have competing definitions. Which one do you think you’re using? How do you know you’re guessing right? Is an active_customer someone who logged in within the past 30 days or someone who made a purchase in the past year?
I once knew two analysts in the same group who completed the same analysis on the same data and reached opposite conclusions. One understood the undocumented nuances in the data while the other could only take it at face value. The one with the better understanding produced the correct conclusion. The difference wasn’t skill. It was context. The bottom line:
If the meaning isn’t written, it doesn’t exist. And if it doesn’t exist, it will be misinterpreted.
