Words

[Gary Petty] A man walks into a doctor's office, and he says, "I have the shingles." The receptionist knows how painful the disease is of shingles, so she has him fill out some forms very quickly and says, "Okay, you need to go into a room over there." So he does that. He fills out the forms, and he goes into a small room. A nurse comes in and says, "So, you're the man with shingles?" And he says, "Yes." So she says, "Okay, we need to do some blood work." So she does the blood work. She says, "Now, as we're doing this you need to take off all your clothes, and put on this gown, and wait for the doctor to come." So he did. He did the blood work then he took off his clothes, and put on the gown. He had to wait there a long time. It was cold. About a half hour later the doctor comes in and says, "Well, you're the man with shingles?" And he said, "Yes." He says, "Well, where are they?" He says, "Well, they're out in the truck. I wasn't sure where I was supposed to leave them off."

You know, words can have a lot of different meanings can't they? And how many miscommunications between people are because we just don't have the same meaning to a word or we have word with various meanings, and we don't understand each other.

In The Dynamics of Human Communications: A Laboratory Approach, Gail E. Myers and Michele Tolela Myers make this comment about words:

"To complicate things further we're often under the delusion that one word equals one usage, one way of using it. Take the word run as an example. You can run a 50 yard sprint, run a business, run your hose, have a runny nose, have a run of cards, run your household the way you like it, run out of time, run out of cereal, run out on somebody, run over somebody with your car. It has been shown that the 500 most common words in the English language have about 14,000 different meanings, an average of 28 different meanings per word."

You know when we are in a conversation with someone we need to make sure we have an agreement on the words being used. Sometimes when you have a very negative response to what someone is saying until you respond in a negative way, sometimes you need to stop and say, "Wait a minute. How is that person using that word?"

You know, the Proverbs in the scripture says, "The heart of the righteous studies how to answer" (Proverbs 15:28).

One of the most important things that you can do in studying how to answer someone when there seems to be a conflict is sometimes just ask, "What do you mean by this?" or "Could you clarify this?" or "Can you explain this?" You may find out that you don't really have a difference; you're just using a word in a different way.

That's BT Daily. Join us next time.