Speaking vs. Talking

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jane.

Hi, Jane. Where are you calling from?

Hi, I’m from Dallas, Texas.

All right. What’s on your mind?

Well, I have a very interesting conundrum.

Oh, great.

It has to do with the use of the word talk and the word speak.

When you talk with someone, are you speaking to them? Are you speaking with them? Are you talking to them? Are you talking with them? I can never get this straight.

I want to say thank you for speaking with me or it was great talking to you. So I just never know exactly what to use.

That requires a little bit of teasing out, so a little bit of unpuzzling there, or a little bit of puzzling, I guess.

Yeah, yeah.

Why have you been puzzling over this, Jane?

Actually, her Terry Gross, when I listen to her, she’ll say to her guest, thank you, it was great talking to you. And I often thought, well, isn’t it speaking with those people? I just can’t quite figure that one out.

That’s a really good example of where we’ve got a kind of discontinuity in there. You would expect Terry to say speaking with, right?

I would think so.

Because our intuition as English speakers is that if you’re speaking with somebody, both parties are kind of having an equal say, right? It’s a conversation. It’s a dialogue.

And if you’re speaking to somebody, it’s more of a one-way traffic. So say somebody speaking to an auditorium or, in Terry’s case, speaking to a microphone.

I’m not surprised to hear that she used to instead of with because a lot of times in radio, you’re very conscious of the fact that there’s a huge audience out there listening to you. So it’s kind of more speaking to rather than with most of your audience, even if the whole conversation was with somebody else in one other studio far away.

Is speak and talk interchangeable? I mean, is there any difference? Is that your question?

That’s part A, and part B is the to and with.

Well, the to and the with I think we’re good on. And so talk versus speak, they are for the most part interchangeable, at least as far as definition goes or meaning, the semantics of it, right?

But what you’ll find if you look at the usage patterns of these words is that people make a distinction whether they know it or not. You talk to somebody if they are a friend, a confidant, somebody that you know personally, if there’s some kind of intimacy there, not necessarily romantic intimacy, but a one-to-one relationship.

But you’ll find if you look at the usage patterns for speak, that it’s usually a more formal situation. For example, you speak to a crowd, you speak to a lawyer, you speak to a manager, whereas you talk to a friend or a doctor or a mom or a counselor.

Do you see the difference there?

Yes, that’s interesting.

So you’ll often find, again, whether people know it or not, you’ll often find that people make these distinctions when two words appear to be synonymous.

One of the things that they talk about when you take beginning linguistics classes is that there’s actually no such thing as a perfect synonym. And part of the reason they say that is because even if two words start out the same as English speakers, we often make a difference later.

We often decide unconsciously or consciously to differentiate two words that otherwise appear the same.

Very interesting. Thank you. Great show.

Thank you. Thank you for calling.

You’re welcome.

Thank you for letting me get a little wonky on you, Jane.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean, you speak the speech and you talk the talk.

Yeah.

It’s a little more elevated if you’re talking about speaking. And the reason that you think that it’s elevated is because of your experience with the word.

Other people’s use of the word speak or speech or different forms of them have informed your own understanding. There’s like these invisible flags attached to these words that tell you when they’re best used.

And this is one of the places, Martha, and I could go on and on about this, but this is one of the places where I like to point out that dictionaries are woefully incomplete.

They do not contain any kind of indication that kind of reflects the natural intuition that you and I have. They don’t.

This stuff is almost completely absent from dictionaries. Some of the learner’s dictionaries have it, but very little of it, and most of them don’t.

Well, I’m glad we could speak to that.

Well, if you’d like to talk with us or speak to us, the number is 1-877-929-9673. Or you can send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.