![]() ![]() Rather, the speaker and the hearer share responsibility to conduct a productive dialogue. Finding the right words is very difficult there is no way around that, and relative success or failure to express oneself cannot rightfully be accredited only to the speaker. The act of selecting words to express or describe a particular action is a highly subjective and unscientific thing, yet communicating with others demands that we consider the great weight of connotation in our curation process, at least if we would like to be understood. Think about how many words there are for even simple actions, like talking: we’ve got “speak,” “profess,” “note,” “remark,” “state,” “tell,” “declare” and so on for nearly forever.Īlthough these words are all united under the umbrella of “synonym,” they each have their own associations. The expression under question also proves untruthful in cases not relating to exceptional stress or circumstantial shortcoming, for reasons related to my personal gripe with referring to actions as words at all.Īctions can be described as events, decisions, occurrences or whatever else you may prefer most importantly, they occur in the real world and are thus irreducible to the confines of the 26 letters of the English language. I give the above example in order to show that people are flawed, and this leads to errors in matching words and actions. One might object that if you really cared, then you would never have forgotten their birthday in the first place, but who among us can honestly say that they have never been so sucked into your own world, dealing with your own trials and tribulations, and subsequently done something as innocent as forgetting the date? Perhaps some people are perfect angels with steel trap memories, but I know I am not, and I do not think that my inability to deal with life’s challenges without letting some events slip through the cracks in my memory says anything meaningful about who I am as a friend. The words you tell your friend - that you are sorry, that you care, that you want to make it up to them - are honest to your feelings, even if actions seemed to indicate otherwise. ![]() To say that you do not really care about your friend would be a gross misrepresentation of the reality of the situation. That does not mean, however, that your act of forgetting is indicative of your actual apathy toward your friend it just means that you forgot something. Your best friend has every right to feel sad or angry that you “forgot” their birthday. ![]() You call your best friend to apologize, explaining the stresses you are facing and offering to take them out that weekend for dinner and drinks to celebrate. You realize your best friend’s birthday was yesterday, and you feel absolutely awful immediately. Since you are mentally bogged down with whatever it is you are dealing with, you have hardly looked at a calendar for weeks. To successfully act out one’s plans or aspirations is an ideal, sure, but there are far too many reasons this may not work.įor example, imagine that you are going through a particularly stressful time in your life. Does this mean we can rightfully assume that one who fails to act in accordance with their intent did not actually have that intention? I say no the world is simply flawed. There is great difficulty in bringing one’s conceptual convictions to fruition in reality, even if the actor’s intentions are entirely wholesome. Actions occur in the real world: a person has an intended result, but the result is not always achieved. Actions are events, perhaps carried out primarily by one agent but likely influenced by a number of contextual factors. ![]() To say that actions “speak” may be figuratively meaningful, but I think the verb mischaracterizes what it means to act in a significant way. There are two reasons for this, the first dealing with the way the aphorism is worded. This specific use of the expression, I argue, represents the whole of its scope applied in other contexts, it is not true. I accept this use of the phrase there is no sense in saying one thing, only to show in your actions that you did not mean what you said. We might paraphrase it to mean something like this: if you claim to have one particular belief, yet act in a manner that contradicts that purported belief, then your actions will reveal that the belief was only a farce. “Actions speak louder than words” is an expression that is so commonly used, its truth also seems self-evident. ![]()
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