Languages of Wilder Confusion: Win
Would you encourage Christians to want to win people for Christ? Yes! Would you suggest they fight and kill them to do this? What?!! And yet that could very easily be a conclusion people reach. How?
Well in Nigerian English people use ‘win’ where British English uses ‘defeat’.
Education is the only tool to win all the violence
Source 1: Sunday school ‘this small group of Israelites were going to win the bad bad people’. (about Gideon)
Source 2: Education is the only tool to win all the violence.
(I wonder how the book “How to win friends and influence people” goes down.)
It’s not that one meaning for ‘win’ is right, but if we don’t recognise the differences then it’s a recipe for silent disaster; we may not notice any misunderstanding has happened.
(You should perhaps read Languages of Wilder Confusion)
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