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by BoorishBears 1001 days ago
"Listen" is a slippery word.

Listening is not hearing. You can listen to a song and not hear the words it contains. Not hear the intent behind each line.

You hear by...
2 comments
tourmalinetaco 1001 days ago
You heard what OP said, but did not listen to their message.
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nonrandomstring 1001 days ago
I'll bite :) There's a couple of research texts that I'd suggest make "listening" an attentive activity higher up the cognitive than hearing. Auditory neuroscience: Schnupp, Nelken and King (2011) and Thinking in Sound: Bigand and McAdams both talk about "hearing" mainly at the physioacoustic (signal perceptual) level, whereas "listening experiments" tend to focus on the structural and semantic processing faculties.

Of course that's an over-rigid appeal to scientific words, and I appreciate your saying it can kinda work with the words exchanged. Bit like the tussle we once had here over "ethics" versus "morals" :)

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BoorishBears 1001 days ago
There's a bit of critical thinking that I'd suggest makes the distinction moot here:

Unity could have said 'listen', and given the insane mismatch between their past actions and the current rather predictable response, there'd be precious little comfort the sentence "We Have <Either> You" could provide compared to whatever their next actions are.

With all your research I'm sure you've come across this concept in the often quoted form: "actions speak louder than words"

(And for posterity, they even said they're listening: they just don't open with it...)

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