Context

Unless you are living alone inside a cave and just talking to yourself or autistic, you'll have to contend with the fact that communication takes place within a context or a set of circumstances that imbue what is being communicated with meaning not found in the actual thing that was said, heard, or written.

In the often used model for communication, you have the sender, the receiver, and the medium. But outside this model and in the elements of this model is the context or situation where the communication is taking place.

Even in analyzing writing style, you will become aware that the a word can be made to mean different things depending on how you use it.

A spiffier mode of figuring out meanings is structural analysis.

Structuralism is concerned with the interrelationship of the various signifiers within a sign system. The aim of structural analysis is to reconstruct an object in such a way as to make clear the rules by which it functions. In film, structural analysis attempts to identify how film images function as a unique system of representation. It attempts to uncover how the film system sifts and organizes its material in order to render it intelligible.

In any case, however you want to go about your efforts at communicating, don't make the mistake of talking loudly to yourself about liking the color blue when you're in the company of people who love green.

Words signify more than what they mean in the dictionary.