How acute an observation is this?  I was reading an article about whether you can take love for your dogs too far and I came across this line:

“Men usually love dogs because they don't talk, which makes them the perfect pals. A guy can have an intense relationship… and never have to discuss it.”

Wow.  I have never heard such a great summary of the male condition with regard to relationships.  Maybe it explains many of the problems that I have had with my father over the years, which I will not cover in detail here.  Then again, maybe not.

It can, however, explain the notion I have always had that two people sitting silently with one another and enjoying each other’s company is a perfectly reasonable thing.  People are scared to death of gaps in any conversation.  They are scared of silence.

It could simply be that we derive so much about what the people we are talking with are feeling from their tone of voice.  Is the person you are talking to excited?  Downtrodden?  Contemplative?  Frustrated?  All of these things project very clearly through the transparency of tone of voice.  They also can be read somewhat from facial expressions as well.

In fact, I dare to say that we derive more meaning from tone of voice than we do choice of words.  Words and sentences are so clumsy.  It is only with the help of tone and body language that we are able to make ourselves clearly understood.  And sometimes we even mess that up.

A funny example I can think of is the term “Large Dog Biscuits”.  There is no tone here to help us out.  Are the biscuits large or are the dogs?  Or both?  A trivial example, I know but it’s a fun one. 

The English language (as spoken in the United States but probably everywhere else too) is inherently ambiguous.  This can be the only possible explanation I can come up with for why a single country needs so many lawyers.  When lawyers speak, they are using a completely different vocabulary even though they are using the very same words we use in daily speech with the occaisional 50-cent word such as “heretofore” thrown in (no doubt to confuse the lay person).

Sure, Lawyers co-opt common words on a regular basis and infuse them with completely different meanings.  This also happens regularly as a matter of course with the people who come up with new slang.  My bass teacher brought to my attention one time this analysis when comparing “the Blues” to English slang.

“When I say ‘I’m just chilling in the crib’ it doesn’t mean that I’m sitting in a baby’s bed and cold but most people know what it means.”

The surest example that I can come up with that words don’t mean as much as tone is the fact that music does so much better a job at communicating emotion than words could ever hope to do – and music is all about tone, rhythm, phrasing which are the same devices used in speech.  I offer as proof any movie of your choice, unless of course it has no music, in which case it doesn’t count.  Music is used to move the plot along and to tell you exactly what how you should be interpreting a scene: whether something scary is happening or something happy or something boring.  You name it.  Who needs words?