What You Say...

Don't laugh, but there was a time when I dreamed of becoming a journalist/ Yup, a reporter. Most kids want to something like a cowboy or a firefighter or an astronaut, but me, I wanted to grow up to be a newshawk. And given the job market for same as well as the status of newspapers...
But it gave me a lasting sensitivity to the way things are expressed. What is actually said can be drastically different depending on the way you say it. I remember the famous scene from the western The Virginian where a friend calls the hero an insulting name and the hero laughs it off. But when an enemy uses the exact same word, our hero snarls the immortal words, "When you say that, smile!"
People today will often say one thing and the way it is said says its opposite. One time a pastor of a conservative Christian church showed this when he was preaching on the love of God. He leaned forward in the pulpit and,  with a look of absolute abhorrence, spat out, "God loves you!" How many people in that congregation must have recoiled with the thought, "Thanks anyway, not interested!"
How often do parents unthinkingly tell their child as they punish the kid, "This hurts me more than it hurts you"?
And many are not even aware of how they come across. They perceive themselves as caring, even compassionate, as they say vicious, self-serving words. Their actions put the lie to the words they say. I might see myself as determined and committed, but someone else experiences me as rigid and inflexible.
This is why e-mail and other forms of cybercommunication, which strips away the frills and other furbelows we use to cover our naked words, can seem so stark. Our anger, our fear, our confusion stand obvious for all to see. We do not always catch this, as we hear the words in our heads as we write. But when a correspondent reacts not to what we thought we wrote, but what actually appeared on the computer screen, we can be dumfounded to have someone reacting to us in a way that puzzles us.