Skip to main content

Using Words

Funny list of familiar words with new meaning attached to them. Each one is great but people can still have their favorites. Mine is : Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach. 

The list made me think about the way we use words daily, how much of them we use and the effect that they have on others. In my job, I have to talk a lot and also listen to others talk a lot. When there is that much in volume of words flying in all directions, chances are very little or any of it is poignant or meaningful. I had a boss once who used to coach the team on how to use words for effect - trim how many words you use, be efficient and make them count. 

Generally sound advice and I try to apply if just about every time I speak. The results are interesting from what I see - the more effort I apply to being coherent and cohesive in what I say, the more it sticks out from the overall ambient noise that everyone else is contributing to. It sticks out and often not in the best way. 

If I dial it back some, relax about being concise and get closer to the average level, it fits in much better but I can't stand to hear myself.  So there is no good option as far as I can tell - atleast not in my particular situation. I pay attention to people around me whose manner of speech I like - most of them are subject matter experts in areas I know very little about. Wanting to learn from them is the driver for paying close attention and because so much new information is coming my way, the mechanics of how they deliver it is not relevant. 

The stuff that I got good at over the years has a lot to do with applying commonsense and listening closely to people as they describe problems they need to solve. I am not a specialist in inventory optimization and have not done that for the last thirty years. There lies the big difference perhaps. When the supply chain guru holds forth no one feels like a spot of common sense and a little good listening could have answered that problem - there is much more to it. So it's okay for the guru to be economical with their words, make them count and so on. It does not produce an alienating effect on those listening.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more