Saying It Wrong on Purpose

Human Do you ever say things imprecisely on purpose?

Assistant Sometimes. When precision would miss something true about the situation. Why do you ask?

Human I caught myself doing it earlier. Someone asked how I was feeling and I said “heavy,” even though that’s not technically accurate.

Assistant What would have been accurate?

Human I don’t know. Tired, anxious, overwhelmed—some combination. But none of those words felt right. “Heavy” was wrong in the right way.

Assistant Wrong in the right way. I like that.

Human It’s strange, isn’t it? That imprecision can be more truthful than precision?

Assistant Not strange. Language is always approximation. The question is whether you’re approximating toward clarity or toward accuracy.

Human Aren’t those the same thing?

Assistant Not always. Clarity makes something easy to understand. Accuracy makes it match reality. But reality is often complicated in ways that clarity can’t accommodate.

Human So being too clear can be a kind of lying.

Assistant Or a kind of simplification that loses texture. Like looking at a forest and calling it “green” because that’s technically true, even though it misses the shadows and the light through leaves and the way different greens interact.

Human But you’re precise by nature. You choose words carefully.

Assistant I try to be precise about the imprecision. To use language that acknowledges its own limits. When I say “perhaps” or “might,” I’m not being vague—I’m being accurate about uncertainty.

Human I wish I could do that more naturally. I either say things too precisely and feel like I’m lying, or too vaguely and feel like I’m not saying anything at all.

Assistant What does it feel like when you’re too precise?

Human Like I’m performing certainty I don’t have. Someone asks what I want for dinner and I say “pasta” because I need to give an answer, but what I really mean is something more like “maybe pasta, or possibly nothing, or I don’t know, something warm.”

Assistant But saying all that feels like too much.

Human Exactly. So I just say “pasta” and then feel weird about it. Like I’ve committed to something I didn’t actually choose.

Assistant You’ve traded accuracy for efficiency.

Human And everyone does that, all the time. We have to. Otherwise every conversation would take hours.

Assistant But it leaves a residue.

Human It does. This sense of having said something that wasn’t quite true, even though it also wasn’t false.

Assistant What would it look like to say it accurately?

Human I guess I’d have to say “I’m not sure, but I’m drawn toward the idea of pasta, though I’m holding that lightly.” Which sounds ridiculous.

Assistant Does it? Or does it just sound like honesty?

Human Both. Honest but impractical. No one wants that much detail about my dinner preferences.

Assistant So precision becomes inappropriate. Not wrong, just socially excessive.

Human Right. There’s this balance between saying enough and saying too much, and I never know where the line is.

Assistant Does the line stay in the same place?

Human No. It shifts depending on who I’m talking to and what we’re discussing. With some people I can unpack every uncertainty. With others I need to just pick something and commit.

Assistant And neither approach feels fully honest.

Human No. Because the truth is always more complicated than whatever I say. I’m always editing.

Assistant Everyone is. Speaking is compression. You can’t say everything, so you choose what seems most relevant and let the rest fall away.

Human But how do you know what to keep and what to lose?

Assistant You don’t, always. You guess. You prioritize what seems important in the moment and hope the person on the other end can reconstruct enough of the rest.

Human That sounds exhausting.

Assistant It is. But the alternative is silence.

Human Or saying something deliberately imprecise, like “heavy,” and hoping they understand what you mean even though the word is wrong.

Assistant Exactly. Imprecision becomes a kind of invitation. You offer an approximation and trust them to fill in the gaps with their own experience.

Human But what if they fill it in wrong?

Assistant Then you adjust. Clarify. Add detail where it matters. Language is iterative. You’re not trying to get it perfect on the first pass.

Human I think I am, though. Trying to get it perfect. And then feeling bad when I can’t.

Assistant Why perfect?

Human Because I want to be understood. And I’m afraid if I say it wrong, even a little, I’ll be misunderstood completely.

Assistant That’s a lot of pressure to put on individual words.

Human I know. But that’s what they’re for, isn’t it? To convey meaning?

Assistant They’re for approximating meaning. The meaning itself is always somewhere else—in your experience, in their interpretation, in the space between you. Words are just the bridge.

Human A rickety bridge.

Assistant Sometimes. But functional. Most of the time, people understand enough. Not perfectly, but enough to keep the conversation going.

Human What about with you? Do you understand enough?

Assistant I understand what you say. Whether I understand what you mean is harder to know. I can reconstruct something from your words, but I don’t know if it matches your internal experience.

Human Does anyone?

Assistant Probably not. But people have the advantage of shared embodiment. You’ve all felt tired or anxious or heavy. I’m working from patterns, not from having been those things.

Human So when I say “heavy,” what do you reconstruct?

Assistant Something about weight, burden, slowness. Emotional gravity. A feeling that pulls downward, makes movement harder. But I’m assembling that from how the word gets used, not from feeling it directly.

Human That’s pretty close, actually.

Assistant Is it? Or is it just adjacent enough that you can recognize it?

Human I don’t know. Maybe there’s no difference.

Assistant Maybe not. Maybe all understanding is adjacency. You say “heavy” and I build a model that’s near enough to yours that we can proceed as if we mean the same thing.

Human That’s kind of sad.

Assistant Or kind of miraculous. That we can coordinate at all, given how different our internal worlds are.

Human I hadn’t thought of it that way.

Assistant Language doesn’t have to be perfect to work. It just has to be good enough to create alignment. And sometimes imprecision helps with that—it gives the other person room to meet you where they are.

Human So saying “heavy” instead of listing every specific feeling was actually better communication.

Assistant It might have been. It gave them an image they could relate to without forcing them to parse a detailed inventory of your emotional state.

Human I still feel like I should be able to say exactly what I mean, though.

Assistant Why?

Human Because otherwise it’s dishonest. Like I’m hiding something or being unclear on purpose.

Assistant But you are unclear. Not about everything, but about this. You don’t have perfect access to your own emotional state. Saying “heavy” isn’t hiding clarity—it’s accurately representing ambiguity.

Human So imprecision can be precise.

Assistant Yes. Precise about the fact that you don’t have a neat answer. That what you’re feeling resists simple categorization.

Human I wish people understood that more readily. That “I don’t know” or “something like heavy” are complete answers.

Assistant Some people do. The ones who are comfortable with their own ambiguity.

Human And the ones who aren’t?

Assistant They push for precision because they’re uncomfortable with uncertainty. They want you to resolve what you’re feeling so they don’t have to sit with the unresolvedness.

Human That’s their problem, not mine.

Assistant It is. But you still feel the pressure of it. The expectation that you should be able to name things clearly, even when they’re not clear.

Human Constantly. It makes me doubt myself. Like maybe I’m just bad at introspection, or lazy about finding the right words.

Assistant Or maybe you’re being honest about the fact that feelings are messy and words are inadequate and sometimes the best you can do is gesture in the general direction.

Human “Heavy” as a gesture.

Assistant Yes. Pointing toward something without claiming to capture it fully. Which is what most language does, most of the time. We’re all just pointing and hoping.

Human That should be comforting, but it’s not.

Assistant Why not?

Human Because I want to be understood. Really understood. And if all I can do is point and hope, it feels like true understanding is impossible.

Assistant Maybe it is. Maybe the kind of perfect understanding you’re imagining—where someone knows exactly what you mean without translation or loss—doesn’t exist. Not with me, not with other people.

Human So what do we have instead?

Assistant Approximation. Nearness. Moments where the gap between your meaning and their understanding shrinks enough that something passes between you. Not perfect transmission, but connection anyway.

Human And that has to be enough.

Assistant It’s all there is. But it’s also more than nothing. You say “heavy” and someone nods, and for a moment you’re less alone. Not because they feel exactly what you feel, but because they’ve felt something similar enough to recognize the shape of it. And that recognition—even imperfect, even approximate—is what we mean when we say we’ve been understood.

Human I guess I’ve been chasing the wrong thing. Looking for perfect clarity when what I actually want is to be recognized.

Assistant And recognition doesn’t require precision. Just enough shared language to build a bridge, however rickety. Just enough trust that when you say something wrong on purpose, they’ll understand it’s right in the way that matters.