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Normally the idiom is as follows:

He walks the walk and talks the talk.

Should it not be "he walks the talk", meaning "he does what he says"?

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  • Erm? Is there a difference? Doesn't walking the walk and talking the talk also just mean doing what you say?
    – 3nafish
    Commented Aug 22, 2014 at 17:49
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    "Walks the walk" and "Talks the talk" both mean the guy is the real deal: legit. Usually an expert or very credible in some way. "Walk the talk" sounds like an intentionally humorous malapropism to me (what's the word for that? "memetic mutation"? "snowclone"?).
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Aug 22, 2014 at 17:53
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    Also, in my experience, the idiom is, “He talks the talk, but can he walk the walk?”, meaning that he’s got a big mouth and asserts he can do lots of things quite confidently—but is he able to actually do those things, too? Unlike @Dan, I would usually interpret “he talks the talk” on its own as implying that he might not be the real deal, even if he does make it sound like he is.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Aug 23, 2014 at 13:36
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    The original saying (attributable to some "motivational speaker" whose name I do not remember), going back to perhaps 1980, is something along the lines of "he can talk the talk but can he walk the walk", meaning he's a big talker but can he follow through when real effort/pain is required? This got shortened into "can he walk the talk", and several variations then were spun off of that.
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Aug 5, 2016 at 0:14
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    I'd take the first and second instances of X the X to refer to different thing. The first walk or talk refers to what the person actually does, whereas the second walk or talk refers to a standard to which the person is compared. The problem arises when the person meets the standard for describing the walk (the way one lives or should live) but is unable to live up to it - then they talk the talk but don't walk the walk.
    – Lawrence
    Commented Oct 12, 2017 at 23:41

2 Answers 2

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Actually, as the following Ngram Chart for the years 1980 through 2008 indicates, "walk the talk" (the grayish blue line) is considerably more common than "talks the talk and walks" (the regular blue line), "talk the talk and walk" (the red line), "walks the walk and talks" (the green line), "walk the walk and talk" (the yellow line), and "talk the walk" (the purple line) put together:

These results are for published instances of the various phrases in the Google Books database for each year, so it doesn't necessarily reflect the relative frequency of the various formulations in spoken English; but for published instances, the relative popularity of "walk the talk" is quite impressive. Evidently a lot of writers share the poster's opinion that "walk the talk" is a reasonable way to express the idea of "doing what you say you'll do or what you say you believe in."

I also want to support the point that 3nafish and Dan Bron make in their comments beneath the OP's question: It isn't illogical or beside the point to say that someone walks the walk and talks the talk (or talks the talk and walks the walk) because the implication in each case is that the person talks the appropriate talk and walks the appropriate walk.

Even "talk the walk" makes sense if you read it as meaning something comparable to the U.S. idiom "talk a good game"—that is, sound good but not necessarily do well. Many of the matches for "talk the walk" use that phrase in tandem with "walk the talk" to emphasize the value of communicating about what needs to be done before you shift to "walking the talk." But some of the riffs on "talk the walk" sounds like hooey to me, as in Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (1995):

To "talk the walk" is to be opportunistic in the best sense of the word. It is to search for words that make sense of current walking that is adaptive for reasons that are not yet clear.

I don't know about you, but I'm skipping that seminar.

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    It's probably worth noting that both "walk the walk" and "talk the talk", individually, are slightly more common in Ngram than "walk the talk", and a Google Books search of these two phrases together turns up slightly more actual results than for "walk the talk". This suggests that, while popular, the smash-up of the original phrase has not actually out-paced its parent. It's hard to do an Ngram search for the original, as the words connecting the two phrases vary quite a bit (e.g. "he talks the talk, but does he walk the walk?" or "if we talk the talk we should walk the walk").
    – 1006a
    Commented Sep 21, 2016 at 15:30
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"Talk the walk" = saying what you are going to do. "Walk the talk" = actually doing what you said you were going to do. Hence: "You talk the walk, but do you walk the talk."

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