Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.
“I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.”
“We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.”