Kevin Stilley

by

Define your terms, please.

Allow me to share with you the story of an old fashioned lady, quite delicate and elegant, especially in her language.

She and her husband were planning a vacation so she wrote to a campground for reservations. She wanted to make sure it was fully equipped, but didn’t know how to ask about the toilet facilities. She didn’t want to write ‘toilet’ in her letter. After much deliberation she though of the old fashioned term ‘bathroom commode’ but when she read the letter she had written she was still uncomfortable with the straightforward language. So she rewrote the letter and abbreviated bathroom commode to B.C. “Does the campground have it’s own B.C.?” she wrote.

Well, the campground owner wasn’t old fashioned at all and when he got the letter he couldn’t figure out what she was talking about. The B.C. business really stumped him. After worrying about it for awhile he showed the letter to some of the campers. Many of the campers were Baptists, and they were certain that the lady must be inquiring about the location of the local Baptist Church. So, the campground owner sat down and wrote the following reply.

Dear Madam,

I regret very much the delay in answering your letter, but I now take the pleasure of informing you that the B.C. is located six miles north of the campground. It is capable of seating 250 people at one time. I will admit that it is quite a distance away, if your in the habit of going regularly. But no doubt you will be pleased to know that a great number of people take their lunches and make a day of it.
They usually arrive early and stay late. The last time my wife and I went was 6 years ago, and it was so crowded that we had to stand up the whole time. Right now there is a supper planned to raise money for more seats. It will be held in the basement of the B.C. I would like to say tht it pains me that I am not able to attend regularly, but it is not for the lack of desire on my part. As we grow older, it seems to be more of an effort, particularly in cold weather.
If you decide to come down to the campgrounds, perhaps I could go with you the first time, sit with you, and introduce you to all the folks.
Remember that this is a friendly community.

If two parties are using the same terms in different ways what do you have? Confusion.

Medieval scholastics had a Latin phrase that was almost a motto for them. “When there is confusion, make a distinction.”

How many of you have read the dialogues of Plato? What is the first thing that Socrates always did in his effort to arrive at understanding?  – He forced those involved in the discussion to define their terms.  “What is justice?  Don’t give me examples of justice, define it.”

How many of you have been involved in witnessing to members of cults? Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses’, etc.  – Do they use the same theological vocabulary as orthodox Christians? Yes. Does it mean the same thing? No.

Likewise, orthodoxy and Neo-orthodoxy uses the same terms, but with different meanings.

The conservative resurgence within the Southern Baptist Convention has in many ways been about conservatives making the parties involved define their terms – there was confusion, so it was important to make a distinction.

As a religious leader, guarding your flock, you must make sure that you have defined your faith for them and that your flock understands the language games that are being played in the theological marketplace of ideas.

Do you believe in inspiration? That means nothing, until you tell me what you believe that inspiration means.

Do you believe in inerrancy? That means nothing, until you tell me what inerrancy means.

Are you a follower of Jesus Christ?  Really?  What does that mean?

by

Are you listening?

“The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to His Word, so the beginning of love for brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God’s love for us that He not only gives us His Word but also lends us His ear. So it is His work that we do for our brother when we learn to listen to him. Christians, especially ministers, so often think they must always contribute something when they are in the company of others, that this is the one service they have to render. They forget that listening can be a greater service than speaking.

“Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking when they should be listening. But he who can no longer listen to his brother will soon no longer be listening to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life, and in the end there is nothing left but spiritual chatter and clerical condescension arrayed in pious words. One who cannot listen long and patiently will presently be talking beside the point and be never really speaking to others, albeit he be not conscious of it. Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies.”

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, pages 97-98

___________

“Pay attention and listen to the sayings of the wise; apply your heart to what I teach, for it is pleasing when you keep them in your heart and have all of them ready on your lips. So that your trust may be in the LORD, I teach you today, even you.” Proverbs 22:17-19

by

Effective Communication – select quotes

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.
~ Strother Martin playing the Captain in the movie Cool Hand Luke

This communicating of a man’s self to his friend works two contrary effects, for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half.
~ Francis Bacon

It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.”
~ Yogi Berra

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
~ Ambrose Bierce

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.
~ Pearl S. Buck

They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
~ Carl W. Buechner

Two monologues do not make a dialogue.
~ Jeff Daly

One can say everything best over a meal.
~ George Eliot in Adam Bede

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much.
~ Robert Greenleaf

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

English is the perfect language for preachers because it allows you to talk until you think of what to say.
~ Garrison Keillor.

I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I’m going to learn, I must do it by listening.
~ Larry King

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
~ Rudyard Kipling

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Information is giving out; communication is getting through.
~ John C. Maxwell

No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.
~ Montaigne

“And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven’t you?”
~ Anne in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables

As a performer there’s nothing better than moments where you feel that you have the option—within the given text—to do exactly as you want, where you’re not worried about what you look like or whether you’ve warmed up enough. You just seem to be involved in a pure expression which is completely appropriate.
~ Mark Morris in “Marvelous Mark Morris,” BBC Music Magazine, special issue, Ballet from Ritual to Romance (1996), page 64

When you forget yourself and your fear, when you get beyond self-consciousness because your mind is thinking bout what you are trying to communicate, you become a better communicator.
~ Peggy Noonan, in Simply Speaking (NY: HarperCollins, 1998), page 8

One kind word can warm three winter months.
~ Japanese proverb

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.
~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Brevity is the soul of wit.
~ William Shakespeare

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.
~ William Shakespeare in Love’s Labour’s Lost

The silence often of pure innocence
Persuades when speaking fails.
~ William Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale

Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
~ Character in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.
~ George Bernard Shaw

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
~ Mark Twain

If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.
~ Woodrow Wilson

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in picture of silver.
~ Bible, Proverbs 25:11

How lovely on the mountains Are the feet of him who brings good news, Who announces peace And brings good news of happiness, Who announces salvation, And says to Zion, “Your God reigns!”
~ Bible, Isaiah 52:7

__________

RELATED CONTENT

__________

Book Cover

(click on image)

.

by

Conversation – select quotes

The great gift of conversation is less about displaying it ourselves than in drawing it out of others. Anyone who leaves your company pleased with himself and his own cleverness is very well pleased with you.
-Jean De La Bruyere

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
-Dorothy Nevill

Don’t knock the weather. If it didn’t change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn’t start a conversation.
~ Kin Hubbard

I regret 50% of everything I say. If I talked half as much I would be twice as happy.
~ Kevin Stilley

__________

RELATED CONTENT

by

Yogi Berra – select quotes

A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.

Half the lies people tell me aren’t true.

If you come to a fork in the road, take it.

It ain’t over till it’s over.

It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.

Ninety-nine percent of this game is half mental.

No wonder nobody comes here–it’s too crowded.

You can see a lot by looking.

__________

Book Cover

by

Half Full or Half Empty?

Consider the following account,

“… one study had college students form two lines, go into rooms with people pouring water into glasses. In one room the experimenters said “Please drink this half full glass of water.” In the other room, “Please drink this half empty glass of water.” Of course, the glasses contained exactly the same amount of water.

“Now comes the interesting part. The groups then entered another room where they were asked if they wanted more water. Yup, no half full or half empty just would you like more water.

“Anyone want to guess the outcome? I’ll bet most of you were right. The “half empty” contingent was thirstier than the “half full” folks.” (Source: Sylvia Lafair)

Do you think that there is anything that leaders can gain from this study when it comes to communication strategy?

by

Words About Words

words, words, words

Always be aware that there is a brief magical moment in every relationship when the right statement will change a life forever.
~ Ed Anderson and John E. Peterson, in Loving Words Every Child Needs To Hear (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998).

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

Men believe that a society is disintegrating when it can no longer be pictured in familiar terms. Unhappy is a people that has run out of words to describe what is going on.
~ Thurman Arnold

A word after a word after a word is power.
~ Margaret Atwood

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.
~ Jane Austen

“Plain English”–everybody loves it, demands it–from the other fellow.
~ Jacques Barzun

Words are as vital to life as food and drink and sex, but on the whole we don’t show as much interest in language as we do in the other–more obvious–pleasures.
~ Gyles Brandreth

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.
~Gerald Brenan

Standard English is a convenient abstraction, like the average man.
~ G. L. Brook

Words are like planets, each with its own gravitational pull.
~ Kenneth Burke

Be not a slave of words.
~ Thomas Carlyle

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean–nothing more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” siad Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master–that’s all.”
~ Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking Glass

The manner of your speaking is full as important as the matter, as more people have ears to be tickled than understanding to judge.
~ Lord Chesterfield

Words have power. We must set out to harness that power with a clear awareness that words can both tear down and build up. They are much like a sharp knife that in the hands of a surgeon can heal, but in the hands of a careless child can kill. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” (Proverbs 18:21)
~ Larry Crabb, in Encouragement: The Key To Caring

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
~ Thomas Jefferson

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of demons.
~ Aldous Huxley

We see words that blow like leaves in the winds of autumn–golden words, bronze words, words that catch the light like opals. We learn that words have an independent life of their own, grown out of echoes and connotations and associations. We see that words are tactile; we find rough words, smooth words, words with splintered edges, words to shout or whisper with, words that caress, words that strike.
~ James J. Kilpatrick

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
~ Rudyard Kipling.

True eloquence consists of saying all that should be, not all that could be, said.
~ La Rochefoucauld

True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.
~ Alexander Pope

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.
~ Chinese Proverb

One kind word can warm three winter months.
~ Japanese Proverb

One should not aim at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.
~ Quintillian

Time had no special significance for a certain juvenile and incorrigible fisher of words who thought nothing of fishing for two weeks to catch a stanza, or even a line, that he would not throw back into a squirming sea of language where there was every word but the one he wanted. There were strange and iridescent and impossible words that would seize the bait and swallow the hook and all but drag the excited angler in after them, but lie that famous catch of Hiawatha’s, they were generally not the fish he wanted. he wanted fish that were smooth and shining and subtle, and very much alive, and not too strange, and presently, after long patience and many rejections, they began to bite.
~ Edwin Arlington Robinson

Words are a heavy thing…they weigh you down. If birds talked, they couldn’t fly.
~ Sy Rosen and Christian Williams, in Northern Exposure, On Your Own

If . . . you are willing to think about how we communicate, and consider the words and the forms of grammar, then you are automatically a member of the Authority, entitled to a ring and a secret handshake and the thrill of membership. A word of warning: If you get hooked on the study of the language, you are in that sorority, or fraternity, for life.
~ William Safire

Every utterance is an event, and no two events are precisely alike. The extreme view, therefore, is that no word ever means the same thing twice.
~ Louis B. Saloman

Most people have to talk so they won’t hear.
~ May Sarton

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them a the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.
~ Dorothy Sayers, in The Lost Tools of Learning

Syllables govern the world.
~ John Selden

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
~ William Shakespeare

Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech; that your native tongue is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
~ George Bernard Shaw

The game of life is the game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later, with astounding accuracy.
~ Florence Shinn

Words too are known by the company they keep.
~ Joseph Shipley

When it comes to learning good English, most people are prone to be supine.
~ John Simon

It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
~ Robert Southey

Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
~ Adlai Stevenson

Language was given to conceal men’s thoughts.
~ Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord

A word to the wise is sufficient.
~ Terence

One always refers to language as a tool; but after playing around with more years that there legitimately are, i tell you that it is also, in a vulgar phrase, something else. More precious than pearls at any price, it is a marvelous toy, a plaything of the mind.
~ Joe D. Thomas

English is a language of marvelous qualities. I like to see it properly used just a one likes to see a shirt properly washed and a dinner table properly set.
~ Barbara Tuchman

A new word is like a wild animal you have caught. You must learn its ways and break it before you can use it.
~ H. G. Wells

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
~ Steven Wright

Connect With Me On Twitter

Follow_me_on_Twitter

Connect With Me On Facebook

Receive My Monthly Newsletter