Expressing thoughts too pedantically precise?

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AS or not; I feel I cant express myself so that people understand me right.
Languages are too restricted for what I have in my head, and I think I try too hard to make a person understand exactly what I mean. I say this because I often feel bad after having tried this. But at the same time I feel bad if I cant get my complicated point out.
Its like I cant leave other people to make guesses what I could be meaning, because I know there are multiple ways of understanding everything.
I am aware of this, and have mostly lots of ways to understand the speach of another person.
Everybody else are using their own imaginations understanding words/body language their own ways, so this chaos is confusing me, and yet if I manage to explain something, I feel as if I have revealed something that is too personal, even if its not intimate at all.
Im kind of forcing my thoughts upon others and I cant find my own way of understanding situations instinctively.

It was just necessary to write this down, and maybe somebody relate?

I have this problem too. When I was in college I would use all kinds of precise words but it confused most all of my teachers. I knew what it meant and it's logical, but other people had major trouble understanding what I was writing.

nd the best solution was pretty sadly just not to say it.
Often wish I could though, I love philosophy and debating, but not being able to express your point makes it pretty difficult

These days I routinely leave out most of my thinking when I'm talking with people. My ideas are just too damned complicated for most folks, so I try to stick to one-line comments and glib oversimplifications. As far as I'm concerned it's Grade B stuff they're getting from me, but it seems to be what they prefer.

My more complex thoughts have expression only through writing, and I think that's the proper place for them, where people are relatively free to read it or not. For some reason most people feel it's extremely insulting to just stop listening to anybody, so they're very vulnerable to being buttonholed by a speaker with a flair for detail.

If scientists and technologists were as afraid of pedantic precision as the general public are, water would never come out of the taps. But I allow there's a time and place for it, and maybe the real problem is that even if Aspies learn that a social situation needs a social brain with social talking skills, they can't access the social brain, so they have no choice but to use a scientific style in a social context. If everybody was like me, there'd be no couples going to Lover's Leap to propose to each other, they'd all be drafting huge pre-nuptual marriage contracts and bargaining with each other at committee-style meetings about their relative genetic merits and about finding common ground for shared matrimonial values. It would be more like engineering than love, and in spite of everything being founded on rigorous thinking, it wouldn't work.

Pedantic? Overly detailed? Who? Me?


It's a run-away feedback loop for me. When someone doesn't understand (or I think they don't) I just keep driving deeper and deeper into explanations and detail. I can't help myself. It usually ends when I finally figure out that they don't care anymore.

I find myself working very hard to be less precise. It feels like if I don't use the exact right word others will not understand me, but I am slowly accepting that this isn't actually the case. The rest of the world communicates with "close enough" words all the time. As I slowly let go of my incessant need to be exactly, perfectly correct all the time my communication gets easier and easier and I haven't really noticed an increase misunderstandings. This becomes a positive feedback loop that makes it easier to progress towards less thought per spoken word.

As a kid I used to read the dictionary, and am obsessed with using EXACTLY the words with what I imagine being the connotation I need to use to have the other party understand me. I usually seemed to fail. I am bilingual, and sometimes would even try to combine both languages to make the most precise expression possible. I think the worst was college debate, where I was very competitive but till the very end found myself losing a round that I was sure I had won because the judge didn't understand my point. It was a very strong impetus for me to simplify. But by no means did it "cure me". My boss still looks at me with a blank face sometimes and I know I've totally lost him.

It makes me think of a question that a professor asked once. I t was a bible class, and we were discussing whether the story of the Tower of Babel was a fable to explain language or an actual metaphysical event. He asked us "do you think in a language?" and then "does the thought come first, and then is put into words, or does the thought exist only through words?" I was shocked when my classmates responded that they thought in a language. I was sure they were wrong about themeselves and if they only looked at themselves harder they would admit differently.

Some pretty smart comments here, thanks eveybody!

Its just hard to give room for other interpretations, because I need logic and it would be so great to have the exact same understanding with somebody, but I think personal experiences and perceptions are built on something that can not be shared because I cant project my thoughts to another person (to those who believe in telepathy: good luck!). The fact that everybody are experiencing things differently is just the opposite of logic. This issue separates me from other people; I realize that I cant share exactly what I have in mind, and that I cant understand anybody perfectly. I can try hard to do it, (as I always have done until now..), but I still cant change other peoples perceptions to that of mine, so the only thing I have been doing is to give them a view of how my brain works. Issue detected! So there has to be chaos in this matter, where the only thing I can be sure of is my own experience, and where I have to accept that other people have their own brains. I think it should be somewhat unimportant what other people understand/dont understand, Im not responsible for teaching people things, and the way of understanding each other is another way than explaining details.
Why normal people seem to be so connected to each other, on the basis of superficialities is maybe more clever than I have thought it was until now.

And yes, I have annoyed a lot of people with my complicated word crap, and the idea of writing it down instead sounds like a good one

Yes, I over-explain everything because I find that people tend to misunderstand what I say if I don't. I've been removed from a decision making team at work because I ask too many questions, and I cannot communicate my thoughts in a way that the rest of the team understands clearly (at least not without time to translate them). I want to dig deeper, know more, and they only care about what is on the surface.

Pedantic? Me? Cah. The very thought...
No, just precise.

But, show some sort of interest in what I'm saying and ask just a few more questions - then I automatically tip over the edge into "brain-dump" mode. There's little chance of the questioner surviving the resulting verbal onslaught as it pours out in glittering detail, and they get battered to death by words.
Even as they're backing away, clutching their bleeding ears and with that "deer trapped in headlights" look, I'm still digging for more detail.

Red rag to a bull? The thing that presses my detonator the quickest? "Hmm. But I don't really understand how it works, though - do you?"

Meh. So I just love explaining things as fully as I can. That's not so bad, really.