That a society controls, to a greater or lesser extent, the behavior of its members is a universal; but the methods, the particulars of that control, vary from one culture to another.
Outward failure may be a manifested variant of inward success.
It is also, I would guess, a universal that in all societies people value respectability granted to them.
Today's practicality is often no more than the accepted form of yesterday's theory.
Verbal and nonverbal activity is a unified whole, and theory and methodology should be organized or created to treat it as such.
The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us.
