The Importance of a Definition

Last week I was listening to a presentation at work. The guest presenter made a statement to the group of about 30 employees, and then stopped and wondered aloud why there was no response to what he thought had been an extremely profound statement.

"It's because we're academics and we want to know what you mean by that term," I explained.  In its most magnanimous definition, his statement would have been inspiring.  But in it's least magnanimous definition, it would have been threatening.

The difference between "inspiring" versus "threatening" hangs on a definition.  Wow.

Let me give another example.  One time I commented to a colleague that I had gotten "spanked" by someone else for not following up on a task that had been assigned to me.  I meant that I had felt the gentle reproach keenly, knowing that I had deliberately avoided the task because I was fearful of it.  I was ashamed as I admitted my avoidant behavior.  My colleague, however, took the term to mean that I had been severely criticized by the other individual, with the sense that the criticism had been overly harsh toward me.  The difference in our definitions rested on the difference between "deserved" and "overly harsh."  I found myself trying to clarify my definition in face of a very clear image that my words had created in his mind.  Oh dear.

Definitions are not just an academic quirk.  They are crucial to real life.  You may be able to think of examples from your own family life.  For example, more than once my husband and I have had to clarify definitions with each other when the other person looked taken aback or responded in a completely different vein to what we thought we'd said.

Definitions make the difference between good communication and miscommunication.  And the responsibility to define the terminology lies with the speaker, mainly.  Listeners can ask for a clarification, but listeners don't always do that.  They often walk away making assumptions about what our words meant, and we never know how our words have changed shape after leaving our brains and mouths.  In some cases years can pass before we discover how our words were defined by the listener.  We may never get the chance to clarify.  In the meantime a connection may have been severed, or a grudge cherished into full-blown bitterness, and we have no clue as to why.

And so I ruminate about definitions, how to recognize when to stop and clarify our meanings, and what we can do to encourage others to ask us to define our words.  It's a funny world, isn't it, for us humans and our proclivity to use and misuse our words?