Sticks and Stones...

One of the potentially useful things about speech act theory, what I have been trying to think about, is that it emphasises the fact that words are things that persons use which establish personal relationships.

I quite liked this from Vanhoozer:

We can say of meaning what has been said of guns: words don’t kill (or state, or question, or promise, etc.); people do.

Vanhoozer, Kevin J., Is there a meaning in this text? The Bible, the reader and the morality of literary knowledge (Leicester, Apollos, 1998) p202