Communication

My sweet Auntie Rebecca sent me a link to a website called Read the Scriptures. I have loved it. You go onto this website and choose what you would like to read, I chose the Book of Mormon, I am STILL trying to finish a quick reading all the way through. You also chose your timeframe, I picked 90 days. Then they will send you your reading "assignment" for each day. They even include an audio link so you can listen to it instead of read it. When you are done you click a box that says completed and they show your progress. I am currently 15% done.
Anyway, I found a quote on there that I love. It sums up so perfectly what I often find myself trying to explain to people, but have never been able to as well as I would like.

"'Words do not convey meanings; they call them forth.' I speak out of the context of my experience, and you listen out of the context of yours, and that is why communication is difficult."
--David O. McKay, Ensign, May 1996, Page 9

Because we all have lived different lives and have had vastly different experiences, we understand even the smallest most commonplace words very differently. I broke my elbow at the age of 6 (I think) and when someone says "elbow" just the words conjurs up memories of strawberry scented anesthesia, they put two pins in my elbow and everytime I bumped my arm they seemed to jam farther into my elbow, OUCH!, I had to wear a plastic bag over my cast to take a bath, when they took the cast off my arm had shrunk, it stunk and was COVERED in dead skin. But for someone else, the word "elbow" conjurs up different images. Maybe on your first date with a nice boy he took you by the elbow to help you over a think patch of ice and you were SO impressed by what a gentle man he was that you married him!
Stephen Covey says this, "Seek first to understand and then to be understood." The difference in how we each interpret words is why this is SO important. Before you draw inferences into what someone else has just said, you need to make sure you understand not only the content of what they just said, but the underlying meaning and the intent. I would say that 99% of the time people do not mean to offend, they are just trying their best to communicate an idea, or a thought and have no way to know that the words they just spoke in combination mean something so vastly different to us that it is offensive. Just ask a few clarifying questions and it will be obvious that they had no malevolent intentions.