Let's say that I am given five thousand dollars to make a mural on some business's exterior wall with paintings of dinosaurs on it, those being the words in the contract, and in the painting it includes ostriches, flamingoes, and penguins, among other dinosaurs.
Biologically, I am in fact correct. Legally speaking though, is this something that I could be sued for?
"The meaning which a document (or any other utterance) would convey to a reasonable [person] is not the same thing as the meaning of its words."
All the surrounding circumstances known to the parties at the time of contract formation will be considered when construing the rights, obligations, and immunities that the contract creates.
Whether the obligation was to paint dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park sense or to paint dinosaurs in a broad cladistic sense would be determined by reference to a variety of dictionary definitions, evidence about meaning of the term in the field of business, what would make sense commercially, any past practice between the two parties, etc. In the case where true ambiguity remains even after normal contextual interpretation has been attempted, the term may be interpreted against the party responsible for drafting the term.
See Sattva Capital Corp. v. Creston Moly Corp., 2014 SCC 53 (citations omitted):
[48] ... the interpretation of contracts has evolved towards a practical, common-sense approach not dominated by technical rules of construction. The overriding concern is to determine “the intent of the parties and the scope of their understanding”. To do so, a decision-maker must read the contract as a whole, giving the words used their ordinary and grammatical meaning, consistent with the surrounding circumstances known to the parties at the time of formation of the contract. Consideration of the surrounding circumstances recognizes that ascertaining contractual intention can be difficult when looking at words on their own, because words alone do not have an immutable or absolute meaning:
No contracts are made in a vacuum: there is always a setting in which they have to be placed. . . . In a commercial contract it is certainly right that the court should know the commercial purpose of the contract and this in turn presupposes knowledge of the genesis of the transaction, the background, the context, the market in which the parties are operating.
[48] The meaning of words is often derived from a number of contextual factors, including the purpose of the agreement and the nature of the relationship created by the agreement. As stated by Lord Hoffmann:
The meaning which a document (or any other utterance) would convey to a reasonable [person] is not the same thing as the meaning of its words. The meaning of words is a matter of dictionaries and grammars; the meaning of the document is what the parties using those words against the relevant background would reasonably have been understood to mean. [p. 115]
