Revolver

Hey, it's Sunday Morning.

I knew people were speaking because their lips were moving. But only one word kept coming to mind: Kemosabe.

I was working on a credit card communication project, and the client kept using the word "Revolver."

In finance, a Revolver is a customer who carries a monthly balance. A profitable customer. The type banks want.

But when I heard it, I didn't think of credit cards. I thought of a gun.

The word was identical in Spanish and English. But my brain, trained on Saturday nights watching The Lone Ranger, where a revolver was bullets and chambers and the thing the good guy pulled when the bad guy reached. Seated in a conference room, I saw a weapon in a sentence about interest rates.

It wasn't stupidity. It was history. My brain had filed "revolver" under object, not a concept. Under childhood, not corporate rooms.

That moment stuck with me, because it taught me something: We don't hear what's said. We hear what we've learned to hear. Again: We hear what we've learned to hear.

And for years, I walked through corporate offices slightly wrong about everything. Hearing words. Smiling and nodding and then, hours later, realizing I'd misread the whole room.

You don't need to cross an ocean to know this feeling.

You can move from a small town to a big city and suddenly not know the language. You can switch industries and realize every word you thought you knew means something different now. You can get promoted and discover you're foreign to your old peers, your old self.

I see it in the executives I coach. They get promoted to VP and suddenly realize they're foreign to their old team. The words are the same: "strategy," "alignment," "priorities," but the meanings have shifted. What used to mean "let's build this together" now means "here's what's been decided." They're speaking the same language, but they're no longer biliterate with the people they came up with.

You can walk into a room where everyone speaks your mother tongue and still feel like you're translating.

Because biliterate isn't about knowing two languages. It's about knowing that every language is context. That meaning shifts depending on who's speaking, who's listening, and what history each person brings to the word.

You learn to watch for the gap. The slight pause. The moment when someone's expression says they've gone somewhere else.

The loneliest thing is to speak clearly and still not be understood. The second loneliest thing is to realize you've been misunderstanding everyone else.

And how, even now, my first read of a situation is often wrong. How I still catch myself reacting to the word instead of the intent. Hearing criticism when someone meant care. Hearing care when someone meant dismissal.

But here's something else I've learned: Biliterate people know their first read isn't their last. They know to pause. To ask again. To sit in the discomfort of not knowing and wait for clarity.

Not just with language. With everything.

With a boss's feedback. With a partner's silence. With a moment that feels like rejection but might be fear. With a word that sounds like love but might mean bacon.

With a little work, anyone can become bilingual.

But biliterate? That takes something else.

It takes living long enough on the other side of misunderstanding to never trust your first translation.

And maybe that's the gift of feeling foreign, not to speak two languages, but to know that every language is a guess.

Even now, decades later, sometimes I still hear Kemosabe when someone says Revolver. But now I don't pretend anymore. I ask. I wait. I hold it lightly.