Where does meaning break down?

I believe that meaning breaks down in a combination of two ways: an inadequate understanding of reality and an inability to express the understood with words. In Atwood's "Toast" she writes, "What is flour? We'll skip that part, it's too complicated." I think she is saying that whatever she would say would mean nothing to us, because we would not understand it. If we cannot understand something, what does it mean to us? All it means is that we are incompetent to understand, and we learn nothing about what we are trying to understand. This is added to when we try to express complicated things with words. Love - how do we express love with words? Some may say it's not real, because you can't explain it. You can try to say that it's this tie between two people, but then people will say, "well then how come no one else can see it." Then you can explain that it is an emotional thing, but people will say, "Aren't emotions made up?" You can go all the routes with trying to explain that it's a choice you make, or a feeling you have, or this thing our brains invent, but no matter how many words you use to try and explain love, it will never be adequate in expressing what it is. Someone who has no idea what love is will never get the picture clearly. That is where the breakdown is: it is in the inability to communicate reality with words when the concepts are too hard to be explained.