“You say to-may-toe, and I say to-mah-toe,
You say po-tay-toe, and I say po-tah-toe,
To-may-toe, to-mah-toe, po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe,
Let’s call the whole thing off.”
Every person has a unique way of speaking or writing that sets them apart. Sometimes it’s a reflection of where they live; sometimes it is a clue as to how they live; or it could be an educational byproduct (or lack thereof). Sometimes it is even matched up with the type of personality they have. Irrespective of what produced the difference, it is the distinction that makes it interesting.
Sometimes the language itself adds to the confusion of tongues (babble). Do you eat hot dogs? Franks? Wieners? Is it bologna or baloney?
Perhaps it’s all baloney.
Remember when you were a kid and the class bully was always saying mean things to the kid wearing glasses? Odds are you identified more closely with the kid being picked on than the jerk doing the picking, right? Typically and inevitably, the kid with the glasses grew up to be Bill Gates or someone like him and the bully ended up changing oil in a garage on a back street somewhere. They did a take on that in the flick “Back to the Future.”
Talk may be cheap but it neatly becomes a mirror of the kind of person you are. The reason talk is cheap is because supply exceeds demand. Someone once said that if you keep your mouth shut it’s harder to put your foot in it. Lawyers are good examples of this. Sometimes they figure that, if they keep talking, it adds substance to their argument. The opposite is true, in fact. Succinctness more frequently carries the day. And who likes a blabbermouth or complainer, anyway?
One rarely gets in trouble for something one didn’t say.