We have been educated to think of language, and of people, as something we can get, and in what might be called the fullest sense of the word. Getting it, or not getting it – both the experience, which is acute, and the phrase, which seems not to be – reminds us of the investment we are brought up to have in understanding as a measure of intimacy and competence; and of how hard a word ‘understanding’ is to understand. The understanding between people supposedly referring to some shared foundations, or to what might be underneath where we stand.
