May
5, 2016
Written
by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer
Dear Reader,
I have taken a little holiday
from my writing. Although today’s writing is dated May 5th, it was written
on May 14th. It felt like I needed a break. In today’s writing I
catch up with what has happened over the last ten days. Another semester is
coming to an end and I am reaping the fruits of what I have sowed. The
accumulative effects of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) are very noticeable. All my
students write and talk about it appreciatively and I am praising them. What a
wonderful big experiment every semester is for me. There is a specific issue I
want to address in today’s writing. Simply stated, unless we listen to what we don’t want to hear, we cannot get to
what we want to hear. Stated differently, before we can progress into having
more SVB, we must know about and listen to Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). It is
common for people to want to have SVB when they first discover it, but once
they realize it involves getting better at recognizing NVB, they are put off.
Moreover, there are peculiar complications in discriminating these response
classes. What is SVB for one person can be NVB for another. This is perhaps
best explained by an example about politics. We are in the election season in
the United States and every day we hear the news about Clinton, Trump and
Sanders. It is an incredibly contentious presidential race and representatives of
the left and the right are constantly demonizing each other. Those who think that
they have SVB accuse those who have NVB, but the accusers have NVB themselves. Yet,
they claim to have SVB, while they blame the other party for having NVB. The
old idiom: The pot calling the kettle black seems to have lost all its meaning,
but the reality is that one person continues to criticize another for a fault
they themselves have. However, what is SVB to the Democrat is NVB to the
Republican and what is SVB to the Republican is NVB to the Democrat. Other than
listening to the tone of our voice while we speak, there is no way to figure
out this conundrum. This election cycle is so heated, because we are slowly
becoming aware of the SVB/NVB distinction!!!
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