That's what my friend Robert said to me the other day, trying to explain what he'd meant in a googleChat when he'd written . . . which, when you think about it, makes no sense at all.

Earlier in the day I had come across these observations on the futility of conversing by Osmo Wiio, a Finnish researcher of human communication. For some reason, I find them heartening.

• If communication can fail, it will.
• If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
• There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
• The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.

Found at 37Signals. More here.