posted
I get a different kind of telephone solicitation call sometimes. They don't offer me anything. They just ask.
"We were wondering if you could come in and give us some platelets today?"
Yesterday, I replied "I'm afraid I can't. My daughter is home sick. In fact, she has pneumonia."
To which the lady said, "Oh, I apologize."
"Why are you apologizing? You didn't know," I told her.
If she had said, "Oh, I'm sorry," my reaction would have been different. To me, people saying their are sorry isn't always apologizing. It is more like saying "I feel sorrow for your hardship.
That is why scenes where someone is getting down on someone else for saying they are sorry bother me. Yes, there is a problem with someone always apologizing for themselves. But often times, the script writers erroneously begin the diatribe by starting out with using "I'm sorry" in the context of one person having empathy for the person who then starts to rant.
This just goes to show that people often can't see the forest for the trees. Just because you can understand the meaning of words doesn't mean you understand the communication that is going on. For instance, while playing a particular PC game, my husband used his well earned skill to kill five characters very quickly.
"That is just evil!" I said, cackling rather gleefully because I was on his side.
Was any moral wrong doing involved? No. These days, the word evil can mean something quite different than that. But it can still also mean something so horrible no decent person would ever dream of doing it.
Here is another one: my parents went to one of those self help groups that were popular back in the late eighties. There, they learned that one should not think in terms of "I hope 'X'" The word 'hope' itself was a bad word, a no-no word in their class. (This was something I found amusing since for a short time my parents started using crude words because the same class had taught them that they were only words.) What? These people had construed that hoping was a useless pining for a future even that may or may not happen. One should live in the now, and not worry about the past or the future. Since hope focused on the future, hope was bad. They suffered from lack of context both semantically and philosophically. The here and now can only be had in context of the past and our plans for the future. I get that there was a point about not spending all your time worrying, but they took it to unhealthy extremes.
Communication is as much, perhaps more about context and intent than about the actual words themselves. We judge what is being said by who is saying it. Since we don't have the advantage of seeing each other during discussion, we have the smilies. They can turn a catty remark into silly fluff. And that is a good thing.
Rambling aside: I bet you heard Martha Stewart when you read those words. I thought of them myself, but then I immediately heard Martha Stewart's voice as I read what I'd typed. Visions of crafty projects, and her gloating over how well she has done with them. Those of us who've been exposed to Martha Stewart can't see those words without triggering that association. It subtly morphs the meaning in our culture, for good or ill.
Anyway, I'm sure some of you were wondering which movie I was ranting about when I was talking about being sorry. If this were a professional column, I'd go and find the specific scene that irritated me. I saw it a while ago and I don't remember which movie it was. But I'm not getting paid, so I won't.
posted
At first, I assumed Amka had offended someone in another thread
Then I read the post, and it reminded me of one of my biggest pet peeves with Mormon culture. Ever since President Ezra Taft Benson gave his "Beware of Pride" talk, the words "pride" and "proud" have become bad words.
I mean, yeah, the seven-deadly-sin type of pride is bad. In THAT sense, the word means you think you are intrinsically superior or more important than other people. It can also mean that you are debilitatingly self-involved, and such problems can be extremely harmful.
But a father telling his kid "I'm proud of you" should NOT be a bad thing. Saying "I'm proud to be an American/Mormon/gamer/Hatracker" should not be a bad thing to say either. Such phrases connote approval, love, and loyalty, not self-involvement and superiority.
But try to say that sort of thing at a missionary Zone Conference, and everyone thinks you're promoting sin Grrr.
But this kind of attitude — that a word can mean ONE THING, and once you have determined the value of that ONE MEANING, you can judge the merits of the word itself, and the USERS of the word — contributes to a host of problems, from religious debates to political conflicts to race relations. If people could actually start listening to each other's intentions instead of each other's word choice, we could cut through a LOT of crap.
quote:If people could actually start listening to each other's intentions instead of each other's word choice, we could cut through a LOT of crap.
*thinks*
Wouldn't that require more assumptions, though? How can we know someone's intentions if they don't say?
Isn't the extension of that "Don't respond to what I said; respond to what you think I meant." That would bring its own whole host of problems.
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posted
Hey Geoff, I didn't even think of pride, but it is definately one of those words that has gotten a bad rap. Notice, when being praised in church, that the words "pleased" is commonly used in place of proud.
Katie, I think it helps more than harms. But this, of course, depends a lot on the person doing the assuming. Is that person habitually negative in his assumptions of other people's intent? Then even the nicest things could be taken wrong.
In cases where making assumptions can be dangerous, words should be chosen and explained very carefully. This would include things like court documents, diplomacy, and threads about homosexuality or religion.
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quote:But this, of course, depends a lot on the person doing the assuming. Is that person habitually negative in his assumptions of other people's intent? Then even the nicest things could be taken wrong.
Hmm...
I'm still all for clear communication. Without the initial clear communication, what builds the premises for the assumptions?
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posted
I think our point is that even when someone is trying to be careful, communication can be unclear when taken out of context or when the society starts to morph words.
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posted
So sometimes the person speaking is using the word in a sense other than the currently popular one.
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posted
Most of our communication ISN'T careful though. Most of it is verbal, and things just shoot our of our mouths. Our are keyboards. <-- Edit: just like that. I know what I intended to type, but what came out and what I said were two different things. I meant to say "Or our keyboards."
How many of us have said things that we realized later could have hurt or unintentionally offended the other person?
posted
My responses on this thread were not meant as criticism. I was just trying to think of what the implications were.
Laying the onus of communication on the listener instead of the speaker just doesn't seem... implementable.
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posted
Oh, no. The responsibility is on both people doing the communication. The communicator has to evaluate the person they are talking to as well.
I'm not fighting against you, but I'm saying that people have to actually pay attention and listen, and attempt, at least, to understand what is actually being said, not just grab onto a few words, slap it into a news article and accuse the person of racism, to bring out a vague example.
I mean, I'm not going to get up in front of a crowd of LDS youth after a service project and say "Can't you just feel the pride?" But in fact, they do feel very good about what they've done and pleased with themselves for doing good things.
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posted
And I didn't take it as criticism, in the negative sense, but as discussion. I hope you've taken it that way too.
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posted
How funny is it that the conversation about communication could be breaking down due to a lack of communication?
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posted
Oh, my... Don't even talk to me about 'I'm sorry'
It's become this phrase for me that just pops out no matter what. If something bad happens, even if it's not my fault, sometimes *especially* if it's not my fault, I'll just say that I'm sorry.
I apologize way too much. But I'd like to think it's better than offending people, so I guess it's not all bad.
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posted
I think a little common sense is a good thing. Unfortunately, most people don't have it, so it does make communicating that much more difficult.
Obviously, Amka knew Kat wasn't asking what was literally up, though when my husband asks my son that question, he usually gets "The sky, the ceiling" and other such answers.
I thought she was making a point. That the listener/reader needs to have a bit of common sense. Literally, her daughter is up. But I believe she knew what Kat was talking about, as shown by her next post. If more readers/listeners had common sense, then we wouldn't be filled with a world of answers like her first one.
(Wasn't that pretty much the point of that Amka?)
Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
My stars, Kayla, I'll bet you're right. I just figured I'd ticked her off at some point, and her answers were a way of ducking talking about it.
That's it. I'm taking Kayla with me whereever I go to interpret this world.
Added: And if the above supports a theory of the lack of my common sense, then I have no comment. *muses* Maybe we don't each get to determine what common sense is. I have a feeling what we each think isn't that common.
quote:Obviously, Amka knew Kat wasn't asking what was literally up, though when my husband asks my son that question, he usually gets "The sky, the ceiling" and other such answers.
Hmmm, I do the same thing, Kayla, are you sure your son isn't related to me? Posts: 5771 | Registered: Nov 2000
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posted
My version of this sarcasm is that I generally respond to "How did you sleep?" with "Horizontally," or to "How's it going?" with "Chronologically."
Fascinating conversation, though -- please continue.
BTW, Kat, I'm very difficult to tick off, so don't worry about it. But this does illustrate my point, with the written word at least, very well.
Had you and I had this conversation face to face, you would never have worried that I was getting upset. My meanings are harder to understand outside of the context of my facial expressions.
From a writerly point of view, I've had the privilege of having different people read stories I've written. They all read the same words, but they didn't have the same understanding. Some of them got some points easily, while others got other points. Whatever was easy to understand for them weighted how they interpreted the story as a whole. It was very cool, actually.
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posted
*grin* I thought it illustrated my point - I didn't know what was going on, so I had to fill in the blanks by myself. I filled in the blanks with information you didn't intend.
This is, of course, one of the main differences of communication as art (a story) and communication as task-oriented (information-conveying). If the purpose was to illustrate a point and encourage interpretation, then it worked. If the purpose was to send to me information, then it didn't.
So which is the purpose of a conversation?
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posted
That depends on the conversation, really. It is ALL about conveying information, but the question becomes what information do we want to convey?
During the conversation, is someone simply trying to convey love and affection, so that the words really don't matter?
Or are they trying to teach a complex principle in physics?
Are they trying to say: look at this, and what do you think?
Or are they trying to say: this is the way the world is?
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And if the above supports a theory of the lack of my common sense, then I have no comment. *muses* Maybe we don't each get to determine what common sense is. I have a feeling what we each think isn't that common. ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
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