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Context is crucial ! 
Dog, and dogs...
Let us now take a concrete word and dare a step yet further. Suppose three persons who do not know each other are talking. They may be waiting for their doctor's appointment and chatting in the waiting room, for example.
And suppose, further, that one of the persons, whom we'll call person-A, is commenting on a dog that happened to stray past that waiting room. Person-B and person-C, in turn, are listening.
Here is some input regarding the two listeners:
- When person-B was young, he was bitten by a dog. Additionally, his neighbour's dog used to jump over the fence and make a mess in person-B's garden, scare his pet rabbits away, etc., etc.
- Person-C, in turn, had a lovely dog when he was a child, one that was actually his best companion throughout childhood!
Do you believe that both person-B and person-C derived the same meaning out of the comments person-A made on that dog?
That's right! They of course did not. They could not!
For whatever meaning we derive is done in context, this much we have seen! And given that person-B and person-C bore such disparate contexts, as far as dogs are concerned, they, each, of course interpreted the very same account that they heard in distinct ways, pretty much the same way that very same teal color appears to have different brightness, depending on the color context within which it finds itself!
In the last section, we made reference to puns and jokes, and to poetry. Misunderstandings often take place also as a result of the relativity inherent to words, to meaning and to experience, in general. To clear out a misunderstanding, it is thus usually helpful to spell out the context within which the word or situation causing the misunderstanding was originally meant.
If you try using the above tip and it does not work, let me advance to you what will most likely have stood in the way: when misunderstandings take place, people can often get emotional about whatever it is at stake. And, when our emotions are triggered, they usually lock us up within the particular context in which they were aroused. Well, from within a context where we are locked up, it is difficult to see anything else but what lies within that very context. So, to clear up a misunderstanding, the first step needs to be to bring the person we are dealing with to use reason, rather than emotion, as much as possible.
Remember, experience is what appears real to us – emotions usually constituting strong and/or intense types of experience. It is easier said than done that we can bring someone undergoing emotions to reason clearly, i.e., to be able to allow whatever other context(s) to reveal itself/themselves. But there's always something to learn if we try, whether or not we succeed in bringing the conversation to a level of objectivity and mutual good-will that allows for the understanding of the two or more contexts initially involved.
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