Mate Masie, what I hear, I keep, praises the discipline of listening carefully and holding what one learns in confidence rather than repeating it carelessly, and Willis records the proverb as addressing an active, cultivated skill rather than a passive personality trait: discretion, in this reading, is something a person practises and improves at, comparable to any other skill requiring deliberate discipline, not simply a matter of being naturally quiet or reserved. The symbol is associated with wisdom, prudence, and the trustworthiness expected specifically of an elder or a counsellor entrusted with sensitive matters, a role-linked reading that connects it to figures whose social function depends on being safely told things others cannot be told.
Willis notes Mate Masie has no widely reproduced pictorial form comparable to Sankofa's bird or Duafe's comb, appearing most often as an abstract geometric mark rather than as a recognizable object, which he attributes to the proverb naming an inward, cognitive discipline, listening and retaining, rather than any physical object or observable natural behaviour a carver could straightforwardly picture. Willis contrasts this with the more concrete, pictorial logic behind Sankofa's bird or Akoben's horn, both drawn from directly observable objects or actions.