Everything “meaning something” is a terrible way to live life. It’s a mode with high stress, never able to say one’s true thought, always exhausting oneself trying to wiggle around one’s own meaning and figure out how other people are wiggling around their meanings.
Don’t be a “word bender”. It’s a choice, something grown up with. Shooting straight is also a choice. One choice runs away, making things much more difficult than they ever need to be. The other faces problems straight on, making them smaller in the long run.
Straight shooters and word benders both arise in every culture. The word benders defend their ways indirectly as if it is their “right”, all the while attacking straight shooters and trying to change them. Straight shooters don’t defend themselves, they just think how they think, talk how they talk, and live how they live.
Anyone can switch modes, but we all have a main. Word bending usually hides some kind of shame or unwillingness to “grow up” in order to face problems. Straight shooting seems offensive to word benders, which word benders use as evidence of “hostility” from the straight shooter. See it when it’s happening, don’t push, and don’t push back.
Much of the difference between the two types of people and their two main communication manners has to do with mission. Straight shooters tend to know their mission and just want to go for it. Word benders often don’t know the ideology behind their efforts, they merely have a “way” of talking, certain habits, certain cliches, but they really don’t know where their conversations are headed.
This can likely result from a brainwashed upbringing, an entire culture where everyone has that way of talking. When children say the right things at the right times, their local culture rewards them. It happens in schools and institutionalized religions. Such people don’t really know what they believe, they don’t know how to think critically, they only know certain speech patterns and “right answers” to give at the right times. In essence of their work or subject matter, they are akin to minions.
Straight shooters are different, they actually know their destination, so they just go there.