[This was in his drafts folder, ready to send before he died]
I know what you mean
Only of course I don’t. I’m even more wrong if I say: “I know just what you mean.” I guess the claim to this kind of knowledge is that I understand at least what it is you are getting at. There may indeed be some truth in that but it is surely good for me to be less sure about the degree of my understanding. Let me take an example from my own current concerns. I sometimes say something like: “It bothers me that people take so little notice of the problem of global warming.”
If to this someone replies: “I know just what you mean”, I can bet anything that this person hasn’t a clue. How could they possibly understand that I feel about this in the same way that I felt seventy years ago about people who wouldn’t admit that the war we’d just got into was going to be the overwhelming background to virtually everything else for the next few years? Back then we were asked: ”Is your journey really necessary?” because petrol had to be imported at the risk of the lives of our seamen. The reasons for being sparing in the consumption of fossil fuels are different today, but no less cogent as I see it. Does that make any difference to the amount we drive or fly? Even if the person claiming to know just what I meant was also someone who’d been alive during WW2 it would still be extremely unlikely that he felt as I did.
In my last pre-retirement job I once asked a group of people if any of them would care to volunteer to show that they understood another person’s pain. One brave young man said he’d do it. So I said to him that I found life hard because of my growing deafness. To which he responded: “I know what you mean. I had an aunt who was deaf.”
I’m now inclined to think I should never say : “I know” but rather: “I can guess what you mean”.
Peter Graham
