There Are Many Ways to Say it…

But Choosing the Best Way…

There are a myriad of ways to say anything you want communicated…

The dilemma is often related to the audience, timing, emotions, and a host of other factors that make you choose one way or another.

For example, I taught last night on a subject dealing with the Potential for our church. There are better ways to say what I felt to say, but I am very apolitical when it comes to certain things. Sometimes I “shoot from the hip” or simply “wing it” without thinking about the consequences!

You see, that’s one way of saying something…. but there are better ways. I know. I know!

Someone I know says, “Can I be honest with you?” leaving me often to wonder if other things they say are not following “honesty is the best policy.”

“To be honest” is an example of an adverbial disjunct, which indicates the speaker’s attitude toward the sentence without affecting the meaning of the sentence. It is often used, consciously or otherwise, to preface a statement that the speaker believes is particularly candid in the present context, possibly to an extent that might cause mild offense.”

We often speak with a masking language to hide what we really feel about something. Honestly!

It’s almost like someone who wants to be “upfront” me… Leaves me thinking that other times they are coming in low and from the back like a “backstabber”!

“Truth be told…” leaves me wondering if the truth has been in hiding!

Perhaps I am being cynical, but most of this linguistic sparring leaves me wondering about the true intentions of the speaker. Why must our speech be constantly paired with phrases that question everything you’ve been saying?

Somewhere along the way we seemed to have learned to hold back part of the information we would like to communicate. Maybe we do not want to deal with the subject, or we are wondering how to handle the subject more expeditiously. We do not want it to be messy or embarrassing, so we “skirt around the issue.”

Come on now, let me have it with “both barrels”! “No holds barred”… Meaning to let me have it all, and hold nothing back. Don’t keep it “close to the vest”… Just speak it… Let me choose how to receive it!