Conflated and Confused

I reconnected with a childhood friend a couple of weeks ago. Smart guy. Brain the size of an F-150 pickup, which is really a big deal because I live in Alberta, Canada, where the F-150 a unit of legal measurement, and there’s also a bill before our legislature to have it named our provincial flower, so we’ve got that going for us.

Anyway, while we were reminiscing, my friend mentioned an incident that stood out for him. Something involving an unruly student, a fire escape, a tray of lemon jello and the class hamster. When I said that I thought he was remembering two separate events, he said I was probably right and he was conflating the two things.

That was huge win for me, since it took me like 50 years to get one over on ol’ F-150 brain, but it got me to thinking about our exchange and realized I don’t know that I have ever used the word “conflated.” In fact, I wasn’t even completely sure that I knew exactly what it meant. I could guess that it’s like confused, but I didn’t know for sure, so I went and looked it up.

Turns out I nailed it! Conflated and confused are pretty much the same. In fact, confused is one of the definitions I found for conflated, but conflated is like more when you’re thinking about two things and they get squished together because your head is too small to hold them both at the same time. 

Now I have this brand-new shiny word and I can hardly wait to take it our for a spin. That’s what we do when we learn a new word; we want to start using it. Since we were little, we have been rewarded for learning new words and taught that building new vocabulary is good thing. But newer is not always better. Here’s what all this means from a communications perspective.

My friend had literally combined the two events in his memory, and the word that most accurately describes that is conflated. But accurate isn’t necessarily the same as effective. The thing that really matters is which word is your audience most likely to understand, because we never want anyone to have to use a dictionary just to understand what we’re saying. 

You see, having a big vocabulary isn’t always an advantage. What is always an advantage is reducing barriers by using the language of our audience. If they say conflated, then we should say conflated. If the say confused, then confused it is. But if I don’t know my audience, then throwing that new word into the mix might just make me a less effective communicator. 

Before I knew about conflated, I would have said that my buddy had confused the two events, or gotten them mixed up, and he would have understood what I meant. Now, that I have added conflated to my arsenal, I have to start thinking about which of those two words to use, and when. Conflated or confused? Confused or conflated? Which way do I go? What happens if I blow it? What’s the penalty for inappropriate use of a transitive verb? And what is a transitive verb? These are questions that never came to mind before I expanded my vocabulary.

Functional vocabulary is actually only a small fraction of the roughly 380,000 words in the English language. If you take a look at a dictionary – if you still have one on some dusty shelf, somewhere – you will find that conflated and confused are right next to each other in the dictionary. In my aging copy of Webster’s, they are literally on the same page, along with “confounded”, which means both conflated and confused. That’s just overkill. Whoever out there is writing the dictionary, they’re going way overboard!

And that’s really part of our problem. All those words aren’t necessarily to our advantage when it comes to communication. Expanding my vocabulary hasn’t necessarily make me more effective. It’s just made me more confused. 

Or conflated.