“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
George Bernard Shaw
It always starts the same way.
A casual, innocent sentence tossed across the house like a Frisbee.
“Hey Dad, I just need a little help with my homework.”
Sunday night.
The hour when everyone’s supposed to be winding down—packing lunches, finding shoes, pretending Monday’s not real.
I looked up from the couch, relaxed, maybe a little smug.
Sure, I could handle some homework. Probably vocabulary. Maybe a worksheet. Something I could knock out with a pen and a little parental wisdom.
“It’s for science.”
Uh oh. Science. The most dangerous subject of them all.
At first, I stayed calm. Told myself, okay, it’s still homework. Maybe a few questions. Maybe a paragraph to proofread.
Then he said it.
“The science fair.”
And that’s when I knew: this wasn’t homework anymore. This was a project.
Suddenly, the word homework was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Within minutes, the kitchen was a crime scene.
The printer started making a noise like it was passing a kidney stone.
I’m cutting poster board with kitchen scissors while my wife yells, “Where’s the tape?”—as if I’ve been hiding it out of spite.
Every parent knows this energy. That split second when your home becomes NASA Mission Control, but nobody knows who’s in charge.
I’m sweating over a trifold board like it’s the Manhattan Project.
And somewhere in the chaos, I’m thinking: he just said homework.
That’s how it happens. Someone says something simple, someone else confidently misunderstands, and next thing you know, you’re building a volcano in your pajamas.
At home, vagueness hides in plain sight.
“Can you pick up a little?” means different things to different people.
My wife means the house.
I mean this sock.
Or “Let’s do something fun tonight.”
She means going out.
I mean not falling asleep during the show we started last week.
Even “We need to talk”—which sounds reasonable until you hear it—triggers a fight-or-flight response strong enough to power the grid.
We all live with these small translation errors. They’re the fine print of being human. Vague words that sound harmless until you realize they come with side effects.
What I’ve learned—usually too late—is that clarity isn’t about better talking.
It’s about better asking.
When my wife says, “Let’s do something fun tonight,” I’ve started asking, “Fun like leaving the house, or fun like not falling asleep during a movie?”
That one question can save a marriage.
At work, it’s the same thing.
“Let’s get this done soon.”
Which sounds clear until you realize everyone has a different definition of soon.
For one person, that means “before lunch.”
For another, it means “before retirement.”
Or the classic: “Let’s jump on a quick call.”
Which sounds fine until you remember “quick” is an emotion, not a unit of time.
Specificity isn’t bureaucracy. It’s mercy.
The thing about vagueness is it doesn’t mean to hurt anyone.
Nobody wakes up thinking, I can’t wait to be unclear today.
It just happens. Life’s fast. We assume, we shorthand, we hope people just get it.
But here’s what I’ve realized: clarity is one of the simplest ways to be kind.
It’s not about control or micromanaging.
It’s about making sure the people around you don’t have to live in the gap between what you said and what you meant.
Whether it’s a trifold board, a dinner plan, or a deadline, most of life’s chaos comes from that gap.
And the only way across it is curiosity.
Ask the extra question.
The one that feels too small or too obvious.
It might save your Sunday night.
It might even save your sanity.
