English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
The Oxford dictionary defines "Hypocritical" as:
Behaving in a way that suggests one has higher standards or more noble beliefs than is the case.
However I derived word Hypocritical from personal experience to mean something along the lines of:
Going against your own word.
Or as Itolet put it: "does not practice what they preach"
Can someone shed light on the matter, as to how the Oxford definition translates to the more popularized "going against one's own word" usage of the word?
How does preaching something not suggest that one has certain (high) standards or noble beliefs?
The simplified "going against one's words" seems incomplete, because if I say I will do the dishes, but I don't, I may be a liar, I may be lazy, I may be untrustworthy, but I would not call that hypocritical.
If I tell everybody I firmly believe in sharing household responsibilities, but at home I let my partner do all the chores, then I'm hypocritical.
The difference lies in the fact that in the first case I do not express any standards or moral.
The Oxford definition seems to encompass both parts very well: I express certain morals, and I go against them, exactly as expressed in does not practice what they preach.
