Aberrant decoding
![A living trotting boar, or a dead boar lying on its side? Cave painting from Altamira.](/Images/godic/202412/16/Altamira,_boar4208.JPG")
Aberrant decoding or aberrant reading is a concept used in fields such as communication and media studies, semiotics, and journalism about how messages can be interpreted differently from what was intended by their sender. The concept was proposed by Umberto Eco in an article published first in 1965 in Italian and in 1972 in English.