When Wordplay becomes Swordplay.
An innocent safari wandered into a linguistic minefield – a lesson in language, perception, his/herstory and the weight words carry.
Well, here’s a fine mess I got myself into.
And all because I love words.
Not just words, mind you. I love the wild. The African bush. Big skies. Wild animals. Wild adventures. Wild ideas. And, occasionally, wonderfully wild people.
So when I decided to explore the peculiarities of human communication, it seemed perfectly natural to combine two of my favourite things.
Humans + safaris.
What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, apparently.
It started with a rhinoceros.
Those who know me will understand. I have a particular affection for rhinos.
Thick-skinned, grounded, magnificently built, with an impressive horn and a backside substantial enough to butt a considerable amount of BS straight back into the bushes.
What better mascot for navigating the peculiar behaviours of our fellow humans?
And so, with considerable enthusiasm and the assistance of my equally enthusiastic AI bot-bud, I embarked on a creative expedition.
We had binoculars. We had a rhino.
We had a peacock representing those who confuse visibility with value.
An ostrich demonstrating the fine art of avoiding uncomfortable situations.
We even had an elephant who never forgets.
And we had a magnificent, gloriously colourful, old-fashioned adventure-film poster.
Across the top, in enormous red letters: THE HUMAN SAFARI
Underneath: Same Species. Different Behaviours.
I was delighted.
My inner bush-girl was dancing around the campfire.
The rhino looked suitably unimpressed.
And off the artwork went into the wonderful wilderness of social media.
Then came a message.
When two innocent words stopped being innocent.
A friend who has known me for many years saw the post.
She knew my love of the African bush. She knew my sense of humour. She knew exactly the kind of mischief I was trying to create.
Nevertheless, she pointed out that Human Safari has acquired a deeply disturbing meaning.
She mentioned Sarajevo.
She mentioned Ukraine.
She mentioned drones targeting innocent civilians.
And suddenly, our cheerful little linguistic expedition encountered something neither my bot-bud nor I had anticipated.
A word combination carrying a history far heavier than the one I had intended.
I went investigating.
And what I discovered was sobering.
During the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, allegations emerged that wealthy foreigners had paid for opportunities to shoot at civilians from sniper positions. The claims later became the subject of the documentary Sarajevo Safari and criminal investigations. Their specific details remain disputed and have not been conclusively established.
In Ukraine, however, the term human safari has been used to describe something horrifyingly real.
Russian drone operators have deliberately targeted civilians in the Kherson region and elsewhere. United Nations investigators have documented systematic attacks on people going about their daily lives and concluded that certain attacks constituted crimes against humanity.
Imagine that.
A phrase that, in my mind, evoked binoculars, bushveld, observation and curiosity had become associated with the deliberate hunting of human beings.
The same two words.
Two extraordinarily different worlds.
And one rather stunned South African bush-girl sitting in Austria, looking at her magnificent rhinoceros poster.
Oh, damn!
The rhino, for once, had absolutely nothing to say.
Two edges. One sword.
Here’s where language becomes fascinating.
Words don’t arrive naked.
They bring baggage.
Sometimes a modest overnight bag.
Sometimes an entire shipping container.
They carry meanings, memories, emotions, cultural associations and historical experiences.
And we don’t all unpack the same luggage when we hear them.
Take the word safari.
For me, it brings back the African bush, dust, the smell of the earth, the excitement of spotting wildlife, observation, discovery and adventure.
The word itself comes from Swahili, where safari means journey, with deeper roots in Arabic.
For somebody else, it might evoke colonial hunting expeditions, trophies and the pursuit of animals.
Add the word human, and suddenly the possibilities become far more complicated.
I had intended an expedition into human behaviour.
Someone else heard an expression associated with human suffering.
Neither of us had changed the words.
What changed was the world of meaning we brought to them.
And that, dear reader, is the double-edged sword.
Language has the power to connect us.
And the power to cut.
Sometimes without the speaker even realising they’ve drawn the blade.
But I didn’t mean THAT!
Ahhhh.
Possibly one of the most frequently used sentences in the history of human communication.
I didn’t mean it like that.
You’re taking it the wrong way.
That’s not what I said.
You misunderstood me.
Sound familiar?
We humans have a rather charming habit of believing that the meaning we intended is precisely the meaning everyone else should receive.
After all, WE know what we meant.
Surely that should be sufficient?
Unfortunately, communication doesn’t work quite like that.
Between the speaker’s intention and the listener’s interpretation lies a rather crowded landscape.
Culture.
History.
Experience.
Memory.
Emotion.
Context.
And the occasional enormous elephant standing directly in the middle of the conversation.
We encode our thoughts into words.
Other people decode those words through their own experiences.
And sometimes the resulting message looks nothing like the original.
Intention travels outward. Interpretation travels inward.
They don’t always meet in the middle.
Does that mean we must watch every word?
Oh, heavens.
Imagine the administrative burden!
We’d need a risk assessment before ordering coffee.
A committee to approve birthday greetings.
And a legal representative to check whether have a nice day could be interpreted as an unreasonable demand for compulsory happiness.
No, thank you.
Language is alive.
It evolves.
Words acquire meanings, shed meanings, borrow meanings and occasionally wander off with meanings that nobody invited to the party.
We cannot possibly anticipate every association every person might attach to every word.
Nor should we become so terrified of misunderstanding that we stop playing with language altogether.
That would be a dreadful loss.
Humour, metaphor, irony, double meanings, puns and linguistic invention are some of the most wonderful things human beings do with words.
But there is a difference between being unaware of an association and choosing to ignore it once we become aware.
And that distinction matters.
Especially when the association is connected to real suffering.
So, what did I do?
Did I throw away the artwork?
Absolutely not!
Do you have any idea how much work went into that rhino?
Or the ostrich?
Or the peacock, whose corporate motto had already been amended to:
More Fluff. Less Stuff.
No, no, no.
The artwork was never intended to trivialise suffering.
It was about curiosity, communication and the wonderfully peculiar ways we interact.
So I changed the title.
Not because someone ordered me to.
Not because I believed my original intention was malicious.
And certainly not because I had suddenly lost my appetite for linguistic mischief.
I changed it because I’d learned something.
And learning something new is rather pointless if you refuse to allow it to change anything.
We explored alternatives.
We rejected the office jungle because communication happens everywhere, not just between the coffee machine and the photocopier.
We considered field guides, wordplay, observation and exploration.
And finally, we found it.
WORDS IN THE WILD
A Linguistic Expedition.
Ohhhhh, now THAT felt right.
It celebrated everything I loved about the original idea without unintentionally borrowing the weight of somebody else’s tragedy.
The rhino stayed.
The binoculars stayed.
The African bush stayed.
We added books, a compass, a hoopoe bird and an ostrich wearing spectacles.
Our expedition had found its bearings.
And my friend?
She had done something rather valuable.
She’d shown me a blind spot I hadn’t known existed.
The real lesson wasn’t in the dictionary.
It was in the conversation.
Here’s the irony.
I work with language, communication, behaviour and the complexities of human interaction.
I spend a considerable amount of time exploring how misunderstandings happen, how assumptions develop and why perfectly intelligent people can hear the same sentence and walk away with completely different interpretations.
And there I was.
Smack in the middle of my own practical demonstration.
Not in a workshop.
Not in a textbook.
Not during a carefully facilitated exercise.
But on Facebook.
With a rhinoceros.
You really couldn’t make this stuff up.
And perhaps that’s why I found the experience so valuable.
Because it reminded me that even people who work with language can miss what words mean to somebody else.
Knowledge doesn’t make us immune to blind spots.
Experience doesn’t guarantee universal awareness.
And good intentions don’t automatically prevent unintended consequences.
Sometimes the most useful thing another person can offer us is not agreement.
It’s a perspective we hadn’t considered.
Provided, of course, that we’re willing to listen.
A word about words.
Words are remarkable creatures.
Some are gentle.
Some are mischievous.
Some are sharp.
Some have been sharpened by history.
Some carry meanings we have personally experienced.
Others carry meanings we have never encountered.
And sometimes two perfectly ordinary words, placed innocently beside each other, create something far more powerful than their individual meanings suggest.
That’s the beauty and danger of language.
The words belong to the speaker. Their interpretation does not.
We can explain what we intended.
We can clarify.
We can listen.
We can learn.
And sometimes, we can choose different words.
Not as an admission of defeat.
But as an act of understanding.
Which, when you think about it, is rather the point of communication.
One last thought from the bush.
I still love wild words.
I still love wild ideas.
And I’m certainly not about to trade my linguistic binoculars for a pair of sensible reading glasses.
But I will be looking a little more carefully at what lies beyond the meaning I intended.
Because words don’t just carry definitions. They carry history and stories.
Sometimes beautiful ones. Sometimes painful ones.
And sometimes histories we know absolutely nothing about until somebody gently points them out.
So, to my friend who spotted what I hadn’t:
Thank you.
You didn’t spoil my safari. You gave my expedition a compass.
And that, I think, is a rather splendid example of communication doing exactly what it should.
Not winning an argument.
Not proving somebody wrong.
But helping two people see a little further than either could see alone.
WORDS IN THE WILD
A Linguistic Expedition
Observe. Explore. Decode. Discover.
Hester Street Newsstand — where words occasionally lead us somewhere we never expected to go.
And the rhino?
Still thick-skinned. Still magnificent.
Just a little more linguistically informed. 🦏