My mother once told me a very interesting story about her past. When she was young she had 6 brothers and she was the only girl and the youngest sibling. This story is about a prank her brothers pulled on her.
As soon as she was old enough to recognize things, all her brothers told her that horses were called cows and that cows were called horses. And my mother had no reason to doubt them. Every time the brothers were around my mother they would perpetuate the prank by openly calling horses as cows and cows as horses.
This prank continued until my mother became old enough to attend school. It wasn’t the first day of school, but sometime in the first month or so the class discussed farm animals. And of course when they discussed horses and cows my mother, being very determined, argued that they had it all wrong. It took a while for her to realize that she had been pranked for years by her brothers.
What makes this story interesting to me is that after she told me this story I asked if she was embarrassed. Her reply was that she really wasn’t, she just really wanted to believe that she was right. But she eventually gave in to the common nomenclature.
Basically what she was saying is that in society there are common nomenclatures that are universally accepted; like the words horse and cow. But to expand it further, this commonality includes such words as “friends”, “relationship”, etc. These words are defined and the definitions are accepted, such as “Horse” and “Cow”. Sometimes someone may get the definition confused to the common definition. And that is fine as long as once the common definition is revealed the person adheres.
I mean, if not it’s like you’re talking “pig latin” to people that speak English.
If you have the wrong definition then you are wrong. Lick your wounds, apologize, laugh about it, do whatever . . . . but get it right. But I’ve found that some people intentionally invent their own definitions of words, and then use that as an excuse to con others. Honest to god!
Making a mistake is ok. Perpetrated a con by creating obscure definitions isn’t.
And for those of you that do this . . . . . . GROW UP!
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