Not everyone is straightforward. Not everyone speaks their mind. Not everyone says things without mincing words. The reasons could be wide and varied. But, many a time, we do not say what we mean or do not mean what we say. It does not matter whether we do that wittingly or unwittingly.
In a group, when we are trying to drive home some point, our utterances might be met with uneasiness, squirms, or protests from our audience. By that time, we might have gone too far to retrace our steps to retrieve the situation. Or, we may be unwilling to apologise or withdraw completely because that would put us on our backfoot. Under such circumstances, we may lean on phrases like ‘just kidding’ to bail us out of the sticky situation. In other words, we try to tell our audience that it was just a joke. But, is that true? We know in the heart of our hearts that we were not joking. There was some truth in the point we were trying to make. But that is the way it is.
There are times when you could be asked some question and, after a little thought and a brief pause, you respond by saying: ‘I don’t know.’ Does that mean you didn’t have an answer to that question? May be or may be not. Maybe you knew the answer but you were unwilling the speak out because you felt that it might be offensive or put you in an awkward position. You said ‘I don’t know’ because you did not want to get into a mess.
When arguments get prolonged in your family and you get frustrated with the situation, you may use the phrase: ‘I don’t care’in some extreme case. Does that mean you don’t care? We all know that we use such phrases to avoid emotional outbursts. The fact of the matter is that there’s emotion behind what we say. We know you never meant to say ‘I don’t care’ because you do care.
In situations where we are hurt and people around us try to pacify us or sympathise with us, we often say: ‘it’s okay.’ But is it really, okay? Life is full of such situations and we find words and phrases to hide our emotions and deflect the question by using bail-out phrases to avoid ugly situations.
If you look closely, there’s some truth in what we say but we use some ploy to bail ourselves out of situations which could turn unpleasant if we persist with our point of view.
