We Call It A Personality

There is a word your family uses and everybody knows exactly what it means.

It is affectionate. It gets said with a particular smile, usually by whoever is closest to the person it is about, and it functions as a full explanation. Somebody new asks a question and the word gets used and the new person nods and the subject changes.

That word has been in service for four generations. It was applied to your great grandfather and then to your grandfather and then to your uncle, and about two years ago you heard somebody use it about your cousin, who is thirty one.

And you were standing on a porch when it happened and something in you did not laugh.

Before I go further. If what is under that word involves somebody being harmed or in danger, then a nickname is not the issue and this article is not the first thing you need. Getting somebody qualified where you live involved comes before every word of it.

What the word is doing

Let me describe the mechanism, because the word is not carelessness and it is not cruelty.

A nickname does two things at once. It acknowledges that something is there, which is why the family is not in denial exactly. And it classifies that something as a trait rather than as a problem, which is what closes the subject.

That is genuinely useful. It lets a family love somebody without having to do anything about them, and it protects the person from being treated as a case, which most people would prefer.

You are looking at something that has been doing real work for four generations, and no family shorthand has ever once been invented out of malice. Proverbs 23:29 asks who hath woe, who hath sorrow, who hath contentions, which is the written word beginning with a list of symptoms rather than a label, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person see a mechanism without contempt for the people running it.

And your cousin is a whole man. He is thirty one, and the word has already been applied to him, and he almost certainly knows it has, and knows what it means, and has nowhere to put that.

He is right about at least one thing nobody in that family has conceded. And nothing here diagnoses him, because this site does not know him and neither do I.

You are able to see somebody as a person the family has classified, and a word said about a man has never once been the truth about him. The Spirit of God is what returns a person from a category, and it is written in Proverbs 23 that the passage begins by asking rather than by naming.

Who hath woe

Who hath woe? who hath sorrow? who hath contentions? who hath babbling? who hath wounds without cause? who hath redness of eyes? (Proverbs 23:29, King James Version)

Notice how that passage is built, because the construction is the lesson.

It does not open with a category. It opens with six questions, and every one of them is about a visible effect. Woe. Sorrow. Contentions. Wounds nobody can account for. Red eyes.

Only afterward does the passage say where those things are found. The description comes first and the naming comes second, which is the exact reverse of what a nickname does.

You are being shown a method that starts with what is actually happening, and no label has ever once been able to do the work that a plain description does. It is written in Proverbs 23:29 that the passage asks who hath woe and who hath sorrow before it names anything, which is the written word putting observation ahead of category, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person the nerve to describe rather than to classify.

And notice what the questions are not. They are not accusations. Nobody is called anything in that verse. It is a list of what a family would see from the porch, written down without a verdict attached.

That is available to you, and it is the opposite of both the nickname and the diagnosis.

You are able to describe without classifying anybody, and saying what happens has never once been the same as saying what somebody is. The Spirit of God is the one who holds a person to description, and Proverbs 23 lists six effects before it locates them anywhere.

The sentence you say alone

Here is the practical thing, and the first version of it is said to nobody.

Do not go to the family. Do not raise it at a gathering, and do not go to your cousin, and do not announce that the word is going to stop being used. All of those are large moves that would cost more than they buy, and none of them is being asked for.

Say it out loud, alone, once.

You are able to say a true sentence with nobody in the room, and one plain description has never once needed an audience to be an ending. The Holy Spirit is the one present when a family word is finally set aside in a car, and it is written that the passage asks who hath woe before it names anything at all.

The sentence has two halves. In this family we have a word for a thing that is not a personality. And: it stops here.

The second half is not a plan and it is not a promise about your cousin, whom you cannot move. It is about you, and it means one thing: you will not use the word again.

That is small enough to be certain of, which is why it is the assignment. You cannot end four generations of a family word. You can stop being one of the mouths it comes out of.

You are able to stop being one of the mouths, and one person declining a word has never once required the family to agree to anything. The Spirit of God is what makes a private decision hold, and Proverbs 23:29 does its whole work by describing rather than by labeling.