The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Language and Communication

There's not a lot of slang in Hitchhiker's Guide, which is good for Americans, because British slang can be weird. Luckily this little bit of slang comes with its own translation, but notice how silly that translation is: "sass" can mean everything from "meet" to "have sex with," while they have two separate words for different levels of "together guy." And then there's the whole meaning of "towel." This is not slang that's easy to understand for outsiders. But maybe that's the point of slang?

Language is supposed to get a message across, whether it's information or advice or just a joke. It almost seems to work here, but, this being the sort of absurd book it is, Arthur isn't so great at following this advice. This simple advice doesn't really help him very much—he soon starts panicking (5.95-8).

We usually think that wars could be prevented if only people could talk to each other and share their feelings. But Hitchhiker's Guide turns this notion around, noting that wars are started because people can communicate. Oops.

Marvin may be a robot, but like all robots, he's very subtle with his body language. The narrator really pushes the subtlety at the beginning of this sentence—"microsecond, finely calculated, micromodulation"—and then wallops us the hugeness of Marvin's message: "utter contempt and horror of all things human." That's a huge message to pass in a tiny bit of body language. Do you think anyone there got it?

As we noted in the Writing Style section, Adams enjoys reworking these clichés to make us pay attention to what they actually say. So when Arthur says "it was nothing," Zaphod believes him and moves on. In other words, this moment of communication fails because Zaphod receives the message that Arthur says but not the meaning that Arthur intends.

As with the whale (oh, poor, sweet whale), the bowl of petunias is just talking to itself here—but somehow we get to listen in its final thoughts. Unfortunately, we have no idea what the bowl of petunias was trying to communicate here, and the narrator comes out and tells us as much. If communication worked in Hitchhiker's Guide, we might have a better idea of what all this absurdity means.

Zaphod may be the worst communicator in the galaxy. Here's another example of why he's a terrible communicator: he doesn't bother to search for the meaning of things. Zaphod merely sees the surface of communication—to him, strange symbols are just strange symbols, not a message. Then again, Zaphod might be one of the most successful people in this book. (His planet hasn't been destroyed, after all.) So maybe communication is overrated?

In many cases, the narrator likes to present us with the communication and the miscommunication right next to each other. This way, the narrator can stress how far the real meaning is from the received meaning. Here, he tells us right off the bat that the "message was misinterpreted" before he tells us what the message really was. It's also funny to us that the message gets misinterpreted because the humans put it into a context that they understand (dolphins performing tricks) which is not the context that the dolphins understand (that they are smarter).

This is another of those onion comments, where there's layers and layers of things to analyze—well, at least two layers. First, we start off with Arthur's comment, which we can understand because we have the same background as him. Slartibartfast emphasizes this point by noting that he doesn't share a background with Arthur. Second, Slartibartfast notes how the mice have been deceiving humans, sending them a message about how mice are just stupid creatures, instead of the other way around. In other words, the mice are purposely miscommunicating.

But the mice-human relationship is not the only relationship that's based on lies and secrets. Another relationship full of miscommunication is Zaphod and… himself. In this case, the Zaphod-in-the-past thought Zaphod-in-the-present would be better off not knowing something. Here we agree with Zaphod: it is pretty crazy to hide things from yourself, but as he later notes, he (in the past) had a good reason for miscommunicating with himself (in the present) since he's so untrustworthy (29.68).