Sunday, November 11, 2012

People are different so are their definitions

I am damn sure that you would have heard people saying 'according to me', ' my definition of ___ is' and so on. I always keep wondering when I hear such statements as to why the dictionaries exist at all. Oxford, Longman and many others have struggled to build such wonderful collection of words and their meanings. I just feel sorry for them when people come up with their own definitions and meanings for the most common words.

People are different and so are their definitions. I purposefully wanted to touch upon this topic because I have been involved in many situations of conflict of definitions. Anyways I can't blame anyone of having their own definitions because everyone evolves one's own definitions based on the environment and the experiences of life. Since no two people have the same graph of life no two people can be expected to have the same definitions and that is where the conflicts start arising. No point in blaming on the differences as they exist by default. We should at least concentrate on avoiding conflicts further by trying to understand the definitions of others. Now one might feel that only his/her own definitions are correct and need not adjust to that of the others. I so agree with you because I also feel the same but  do you remember our previous blog 'Feel, felt, found'?

In order to avoid conflict first learn about the definition of the other person. Then analyse if the same definition suits you as well. If yes then there's no conflict, if not then analyse the other person's definition. If the relationship with this person really matters to you then you may go ahead and discuss to arrive at a common definition, else you might just ignore as long as there is no conflict. Please share your definition of feedback on is.mohanbn@gmail.com

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