(no subject)

[sillygoosegirl]

Does trust describe an action or a feeling/thing, in your opinion?

For example, if I say, "I trust my friend with my car." Does that imply an action: "I have given my friend my car keys or otherwise given her access to it." Or does it imply that I hold a feeling: "I believe that if I were to give my friend access to my car, nothing bad would happen (of if it did it would be made up for through $$ or friendship)."

I think I would tend to call the latter faith, and for the sake of clarity, I'd like the word trust to therefore imply the former. While the dictionary.com definitions tend to lend themselves to this distinction to some extent, it also calls trust and faith synonyms. So go figure.

The two concepts are clearly related... a person chooses to "trust" (as in taking the action), very often as a direct result of feeling "trust" (as in faith). But I think the distinction is important too.

Comments

[2gouda4u.livejournal.com]

Good question. I'm not sure I'd ever use that phrase (not that I don't trust anyone enough to trust them with my life). I think the phrase is common/cliched enough that I could probably use it without having to think about its grammatical construction, if that makes sense. There are many such phrases that I (and others) use to convey the standard meaning of said phrases without stopping to think about why those words coupled together mean what they do. However, should I decide to reconstruct your example, I think I would go with your latter suggestion.

[sillygoosegirl.livejournal.com]

That's a good point. There are some phrases out there that really don't mean at all what they sound like they should mean. For example, "I could care less" actually means "I couldn't care less"... at least as far as I can tell. Is this just people being lazy and leaving out the "n't"? Did the phrase originally drip with sarcasm? Is there an implied, "but I don't" after it? Is there something else going on that's harder to guess at?

[2gouda4u.livejournal.com]

That's always bothered me, too : ) I always figured people were just dumb/lazy, but that's not a very good explanation. I found an interesting discussion, but it doesn't provide any clear answers.