"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood."
We exist in a universe of continuous, high-dimensional reality. Every moment, every feeling, every abstract thought holds more than we can say. All of it has to fit through one narrow pipe: language.
An average adult possesses a vocabulary of roughly 100,000 words. This means we are attempting to map the near-infinite dimensionality of reality onto a finite set of discrete tokens. The mapping is lossy. There are human phenomena for which we have no words.
To overcome this, we string words together. A sentence is effectively a vector of words — an attempt to combine low-dimensional tokens to point toward a coordinate in concept-space. But a direction is not a location: one line through a space leaves the idea loose along its whole length. To fence an idea in you have to come at it from several sides and close a shape around it, and three sides are the fewest that close at all: a triangle.
Putting words together is delicate work. The listener decodes these word-vectors through the prism of their own lived experiences, biases, and subtly different definitions of the same 100,000 words. An inverted clause or one ambiguous noun can land the sentence on a different coordinate altogether.
Even a sentence as small as "I'm fine" can mean dismissal, reassurance, or a request to stop asking. The words are identical. Tone, timing, and each person's private dictionary change the payload.
This is why writing and speaking cannot be treated as a casual transcription of thought.
People reach for eloquence. The remedy is duller: a particular kind of redundancy. State the idea; give an example that lands it in the concrete; draw the far edge with a counter-example. Three sides, each facing a different way, and the idea is fenced in. So a fourth restatement that only echoes the first three does nothing: it lays a new side flat along one already there — more words, no more enclosure. The work is not saying it many times. It is finding the three angles that disagree.
If you wish to be understood, assume you will be misunderstood.