You know what they say about the quill...

Words are indeed wondrous.

We use them to express our thoughts and feelings.
But I have also learnt as a translator that, words have enormous nuances built into them. While some of these nuances are pretty well set (e.g. a dictionary definition), a lot of the nuances comes from culture, and personal experience. An example of a cultural nuance would be like trying to use a direct translation of an English swearword into Japanese. "あなたは肛門!!" simply does not pack the punch "You a**hole!!" has.

Like in my previous post, Mr. Sociologist riled up quite a few people by using the word 'infantile', which did not register much of a nuance to me until upon following the comments, I managed to acquire a negative nuance of 'immaturity' regarding that word.

I have also noticed that when I am writing in forums or commenting, there would be times where people would read my comment and fail to get what I assumed I was trying to say, where some other people has no problem getting my message or even read further into it. (Maybe I should contrive to leave subliminal messages...)

The fact we are actually trying to decode messages when we are reading complicates the matter even further as any messages that we take in will be 'colored' by our decoding filter, which includes out personal way of interacting with the world. Like for example, I have read of a lady that refuses to play Puerto Rico, even though she is an avid gamer, and it is a good game, because she perceived it to have 'slavery' and 'tobacco' influence.

Words are a powerful tool, but the human perception makes it dangerous, very very dangerous.