God’s Dictionary: Mean

By on March 31, 2009 in Relationships

Mean

 

mæne = false

 

            This is a strange word. When I first thought of it for God’s Dictionary, I meant mean in the Mean People Suck sense. Oddly, that’s originally a United States colloquialism. It’s defined way down the list of definitions as “disobliging, pettily offensive or unaccommodating.”

 

English actually has three distinct words from this Old English root. The first meaning is intend, in the what I mean to say is sense. The second is petty or stingy, in the ungenerous sense. The third is the adjective which connotes average. But what about the mean people who suck? 

         

All of these different “means” come originally from an Old English root meaning false. Mean people are actually not only being false to the people to whom they are mean, but they’re also being false to their own true selves. Meanness does come from pettiness, stinginess, small-mindedness. It comes from feeling less than . . . everyone else.

 

What do you do when you encounter a meanie? Simple. Make space for them as they are. Don’t argue or try to convince them to be different. Just agree with the meanie and walk away if you can. Ask: How can I be true to myself in the face of meanness today?

 

Infinition:

 

          I know that mean people are often hurt people, and that hurt people hurt people. Today if I’m feeling mean, I hush and wait till it passes, and if someone is mean to me, I love them anyway.

 

Find more Divine Definitions at God’s Dictionary

About peacecorso

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Dr. Susan Corso is a spiritual author, speaker, and counselor. An omnifaith minister and the author of God’s Dictionary (Tarcher/Putnam 2002) and The Peace Diet, she has had a spiritual counseling practice for more than 25 years. She has been an intuitive since childhood. 
 
Susan’s blogosphere writing may be found at Seeds for Sanctuary, Ode Magazine and The Huffington Post, and Beliefnet. Her website is SusanCorso.com 
 
One of her favorite occupations is writing spiritual fiction. She is the author of The Healing Mysteries of Mex Stone under the pseudonym Shulamith Burton. The audiobook of the first in the series, Oklahoma! Hex, came out in September 2008.
 
Susan is the founder of Sanctuary and ten-year author/publisher of a free e-newsletter, Seeds. As a professor at the accredited College of Divine Metaphysics, she teaches and ordains ministers.
 
Susan has been published in magazines, online magazines and newsletters including Business Ethics, Beliefnet.com, Ode Magazine, Science of Mind, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, New York House, Q-Spirit, Self, and Winning Ways. She is the author of several tape series. Susan also writes for the theatre: The God Show, I Would Never, Fight or Flight, and PeaceWomen. 
 
For many years, Susan was an organizational consultant and motivational speaker guiding nuclear scientists as well as entrepreneurs into their life purposes. Some of her former clients include Westinghouse Hanford Company, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Gila River Casinos, and the American Nuclear Society, among many others.

Today she functions as Chief Spiritual Officer for corporations. She lives in one-sixth of a Victorian house outside of Boston, with her beloved spouse, director/actress/teacher Sheriden Thomas, and the spirit of her familiar cat, Charles of the Ritz. 
 
Her mission in life is peace. 

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