COMMUNICATION: On the Use of Globalizing Language

I having been thinking a lot about how often people use globalizing language to describe situations or groups of people. I just had to backspace and retype that last sentence about 3 times before I said what I wanted to say without using globalizing language. This is how pervasive it is in my life. What I mean by globalizing language is expressing your thoughts about a situation or people group by using terms like always or never. These terms are all inclusive and leave no room for exceptions by definition of their usage.

Is it appropriate or even accurate to use globalizing language in any circumstance? I would like to separate it into categories of descriptive and normative. Descriptive means talking about the way things are and normative means talking about the way things ought to be. It seems like very rarely is it accurate to describe something in globalizing terms. The best examples of this comes to mind when I think about fights between friends or couples. One person will say "you always do this" and the other will say "I never do that". The use of globalizing language is most likely not accurate in these situations but merely seems like it. When in a argument the use of terms like "always" or "never" seems to keep us from fairly evaluating each situation by itself to see it that is true. There seem to exceptions to our descriptions most of the time.

I have observed in my own life that most times that I talk in globalizing terms in describing a situation I haven't done the work to analyze fairly each situation, I just want the outcome I already feel in one situation to be true for all the situations. My own stereotypes about people groups, politicians, nations, cultures, and subcultures have come from taking one situation involving an individual affiliated with one of those larger groups and painting their actions as an accurate description of the actions of all individuals in the larger groups. Democrats always do..., the French are, goth people always, women never.... The results of descriptions like this may be true of some with that affiliation, but in reality I honestly cannot be sure of what percentage does my statement accurately depict. Therefore I should not say such things.

Imagine how this would change our conversations, my conversations. It seems that it would force people to examine each person for who they are or each situation for what it is instead of my preconceived notions based on another person of their group affiliation. Wow, this would be really hard. During this blog post alone I had to retype many of my sentences because without thinking I would make globalizing descriptions of people. Something I haven't done is look at how Jesus used globalizing terms, if He ever did. If anyone wants to do that let me know if a comment.

The question that leads us to is: is it ever appropriate and accurate to use globalizing terms? If you remember back in the beginning of this post I made two categorical distinctions of descriptive and normative. Up until this point we have just been talking about the descriptive uses of globalizing terms. I believe the normative uses are appropriate and necessary to convey the Truth of the way reality ought to be or how people ought to act. For example, you should never have sex outside of marriage. This is a normative use of globalizing terms and it is true and accurate.

I hope to make all my future descriptive posts in non globalizing language, if I don't please point it out to me.