In the image above the person with the striped sweater is asking the person with the hat how much he wants for cutting the grass. The person with the hat misunderstands and replies with not wanting to cut the grass much.
The textbook defines verbal communication as “an agreed-upon and rule-governed system of symbols used to share meaning.” Symbols are defined as “arbitrary representations of thoughts, ideas, emotions, objects, or actions used to encode and decode meaning.” Although, symbols are not only arbitrary they are also ambiguous. A perfect example of the ambiguity of symbols is the editorial cartoon above. The ambiguity can be seen in the two meanings of the question asked by the person in the striped sweater. One definition could be about how much money one would want for cutting the grass, and another definition could be how much of the grass would one want to cut.
Everyone goes through this at times and we have to ask for clarification. Sometimes, we even make a joke about it. Although, it is not a difficult or “a hard, hard language” like the person on the couch thinks. This is because there are an agreed-upon system of symbols and a limited number of  possible meanings for our symbols. 

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