"O Would Some Power The Giftie Gie Us To See Ourselves As Others See Us"

Brothers & sisters in Christ, you don't have to agree with it...

...but you do have to understand this is the way a lot of people we're trying to reach perceive us.

In one of his books (either Outliers or What The Dog Saw), Malcolm Gladwell writes about how cultures tend to lean towards one of two poles in their use of language.

One pole puts the responsibility for clear communication on the speaker:  If there has been a failure to communicate, it is because the speaker said something unclear or ambiguous.

The other pole blames the listener:  It is their responsibility to correctly decipher what the speaker has said, picking up meaning from various clues & nuances not readily apparent in a straight transcription.

One may argue philosophically which is the better approach, but the brutal pragmatic reality (as Gladwell points out very, very specifically) is that cultures that rely on the listener to decipher the meaning crash more jetliners than those that require the speaker to be clear, and when those flight crews are trained to override their cultural/linguistic bias and think/speak along the lines of the first pole, air crashes drop dramatically.

re the cartoon above:  I know what Christians mean when we say things like this, you know what we mean when Christians say things like this, but those outside the faith aren't hearing that!

Bear this is mind.

We don't want to keep crashing jetliners.

Wait, Were We SUPPOSED To Laugh At That?

Insane Clown Posse Now Has A Posse After Them

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