Sunday, October 26, 2008
Reasons or Excuses
Am I the only person that is sometimes confused by the use of the words "reasons" or "excuses"? Are they the same word? Some people seem to think so. Frankly I don't. For instance, the other day someone made the comment to me that I was making excuses for being rather slow to respond to one of their demands. When I explained the "reasons" for the delay I looked at the word reason as meaning "a basis or cause as for some belief, action, fact or event. However, this person called it an excuse which means "to explain in the hope of being forgiven or understood". Again, frankly I was definitely not asking for forgiveness and knew that my answer would not be understood (at least not accepted). So will you share with me if you think these words mean the same and can be used interchangeably?
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1 comment:
This reminds me of one of the handful of principles in psychology that have actually proved useful over the years.
The principle states that we tend to see our own behaviors as a result of external factors and others' behavior as a result of their inherit character traits.
So a "reason" would be the external factors to us, and the "excuse" would be the same information interpreted as a character trait by others (i.e. we must have not "wanted" to do it because external factors are not relevant)
Don't know if that applies, but once you have that key, it's surprising how often you can see it in play.
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