{"id":2278,"date":"2023-05-07T22:13:44","date_gmt":"2023-05-07T21:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/binarywords.com\/?p=2278"},"modified":"2025-09-07T23:20:22","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T22:20:22","slug":"la-importancia-del-contexto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/binarywords.com\/en\/2023\/05\/07\/la-importancia-del-contexto\/","title":{"rendered":"The importance of context"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of the books I remember most fondly from back when I was a child were the ones about Mafalda<\/strong>, a compilation of comic strips from the sixties and seventies created by Quino<\/strong>, the great Argentinian cartoonist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u00b4t remember how old I was when I started reading those books; I do remember being curious about words and expressions in Argentinian Spanish, and not understanding some of the jokes. But I didn\u00b4t mind, I loved them anyway. I re-read them so many times that I ended up memorizing many of the strips, and years later I finally got to understand them... Quino\u00b4s sense of humour is really, really clever in my opinion, and many of the topics he explored in Mafalda\u00b4s comic strips and his other graphic humour works remain as relevant now as they were back then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today I\u00b4m bringing you this strip, to illustrate a topic that came up recently:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Mafalda<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u00b4s the transcription in English: it\u00b4s a conversation between Mafalda (a girl who\u00b4s about six years old) and her friend Susanita:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

- Susanita<\/strong>: Why on Earth do adults spend their time doing and saying things one doesn\u00b4t understand?<\/em>\n- Mafalda<\/strong>: It\u00b4s very simple, Susanita. When you arrive at the cinema and it turns out the movie has already started, do you understand it?<\/em>\n- Susanita<\/strong>: No.<\/em>\n- Mafalda<\/strong>: Well, the same happens with adults. How can we possibly understand them, if, by the time we arrived, all of them had already started!?<\/em><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
What do you think of this reflection? Leaving aside the joke about kids not understanding adults, the truth is that sometimes we adults don\u00b4t understand each other either. Have you ever been in a class, or a meeting at work, and felt completely clueless, as if you had arrived in the middle of the movie?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem is that, more often than not, there\u00b4s certain basic information missing, and it\u00b4s assumed that everybody knows it: the context has not been defined<\/strong>. This may seem very obvious but in reality, it\u00b4s not, and it causes more communication issues than you would imagine. Going back to the work meeting example, maybe there was a previous email conversation that didn\u00b4t include all participants, and people go straight into discussing solutions without first checking that everyone knows exactly what the problem is. In a classroom, for example, the teacher may start teaching a topic that\u00b4s completely new and different, getting straight into the detail, without first explaining what it is about, why it is important, and how it fits with all the previous learning. Both the meeting and the class will be much more productive if there\u00b4s an initial investment in explaining the context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And in a similar way, each person also has a context<\/strong>: each of us has a history, a family, a culture, a set of values, personal circumstances, thoughts, emotions, etc., etc., etc. The more we know about a person\u00b4s context, the better we will understand them, and the less we will judge. That\u00b4s why I think that, in our day-to-day, we could all benefit from clarifying the context of our conversations, this way getting to understand each other much better. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But be careful not to give too many explanations! It\u00b4s not necessary to explain everything, only the essentials. You\u00b4ll avoid being told what my mother used to tell me when I rambled on: start at the end!<\/em> \ud83d\ude00<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Una de las lecturas que recuerdo con m\u00e1s cari\u00f1o de cuando yo era peque\u00f1a son los libros de Mafalda, una recopilaci\u00f3n de tiras c\u00f3micas de los a\u00f1os sesenta y setenta creadas por Quino, el genial humorista gr\u00e1fico argentino. No recuerdo qu\u00e9 edad ten\u00eda yo cuando empec\u00e9 a leerlos; s\u00ed recuerdo que me llamaban la atenci\u00f3n … Continue reading The importance of context<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":3116429,"featured_media":2277,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","advanced_seo_description":"BinaryWords - La importancia del contexto \/ The importance of context","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"\u00bfConoces a Mafalda? \u00bfCu\u00e1l es tu tira favorita? \/ Do you know Mafalda? What\u00b4s your favourite comic strip?","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5005,5001,5166],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arte","category-palabras-words","category-quino","fallback-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/binarywords.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/IMG_20230507_175210.jpg?fit=3991%2C1241&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3DPtR-AK","jetpack-related-posts":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/binarywords.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/binarywords.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/binarywords.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/binarywords.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3116429"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/binarywords.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2278"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/binarywords.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2289,"href":"https:\/\/binarywords.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions\/2289"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/binarywords.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/binarywords.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/binarywords.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/binarywords.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}