The Conduit Metaphor assumes that messages *contain* meaning, like a box contains a present.
Reddy points out that our practical experience with containers is that the taking-out is easier than the putting-in. Consider a Christmas present: you cut up a sheet of wrapping paper, discover it’s too small, cut out another, try to get the stupid wrapping paper to fold neatly, put on a ribbon, put on a bow, write a card with something clever on it. And then the recipient undoes all that work in a matter of moments.
That accounts for the frustration when the listener doesn’t get the message. Extrapolating from experience with physical containers makes it seem like that should be easy. Failure to understand is frequently attributed to the reader’s perversity, with statements like “You’re reading way too much INTO that.” (That is, the reader is replacing the original content of the message with a different content.)
Meanwhile the listener is inclined to think the speaker packaged the message wrongly. Like my mother – rest her soul – who consistently and cheerfully went way overboard with the scotch tape, making her presents “cutely” hard to unwrap.
On average, it seems that the speaker gets most of the blame, since there are more metaphors that talk about shoddy construction of the message than shoddy reading. Some examples: > “He tries to say way too much in every sentence.” > “You just dumped every last idea you had into that podcast episode, didn’t you?” > “Simple ideas hiding behind a thicket of jargon.”