Personal Development Author
Our lives can be enhanced by virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri and even that bossy satnav guide who may well have an individual name, chosen with as much thought as we give to naming our pets. With the stroke of a key, we can buddy up with ‘The AI companion who cares’, as offered by a recent software advertisement.
Way back when, there wasn’t that much discussion about bragging or boasting. It was regarded by and large as A Bad Thing.
What's one of the first things we ask about a person we meet for the first time? More often than not, we want to know what their job is. It's an automatic question and it sounds harmless. However, the easy use of the question can be misleading.
The boomerang has found a place in our collective consciousness and its handiness as a metaphor can be seen in a range of expressions in everyday use. In social psychology, the boomerang effect describes what happens when your words or actions have the opposite effect to what you intended.
The digital age, or just life, as Young Persons of tender years call it, has generated a new vocabulary of expressions, phrases, acronyms, invented and portmanteau words. Much of our spoken and written communication would be unintelligible to previous generations (as indeed it can be to ourselves). Language has bent and adapted to meet new needs in ways which at best are clever, lively, entertaining, and at worst are ugly,clumsy and misleading. Particularly problematic are expressions which mask the reality of what they are describing by seeming to legitimise and endorse behaviour, which, well let's say, isn't great.
Good listening is all about the other person. It requires us to give full attention to what they are saying, not only to the actual words but also to their body language and tone of voice. We need to be sensitive to the personal and physical context of the conversation; we need to be alert to shifts and nuances as the talk develops.
My, how we love our acronyms, or — to be more precise — how we love our acronyms and initialisms. An acronym is an abbreviation formed from a series of initial letters which can be pronounced as a word, like NASA, for example. An initialism is when the initials don't make a pronounceable word, as in DNA.