Your BC Isn’t My BC

The following is a story I like to tell from time to time to illustrate the problem of communicating when the sender and receiver are not working from the same worldview or when the same vocabulary is used but a different lexicon.

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There was a rather old fashioned lady, always quite delicate in her use of language. She and her husband were planning a weeks vacation to Florida, so she wrote to a particular campground asking for a reservation.

She wanted to make sure the campground was fully equipped, but didn’t quite know how to ask about the toilet facilities. She just couldn’t bring herself to write the word “toilet” in her letter. After much deliberation, she finally came up with the old fashioned term “Bathroom Commode”, but when she wrote that down, Read more

Words About Words

By words the mind is excited and the spirit elated.
~ Aristophanes

A man’s command of the language is most important. Next to kissing, it’s the most exciting form of communication mankind has evolved.
~ Oren Arnold

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Effective Communication - Select Quotes

The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choicest words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.
~ Edwin H. Friedman

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