expressions - A phrase or a word for not practising what you are preaching



Can you please tell me the word, term or phrase for not practising what you are preaching.


Also, if possible, the word, term or phrase for someone who does so.


I am not looking for hypocrisy or hypocrite but something more specific.



Answer



If you really believe in practicing what you preach, but periodically or for an extended period of time you openly fail to practice it anyway, then I suppose that your conduct can be distinguished from hypocrisy, which Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003) defines as



a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; esp. : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion



Instead, you might refer to your conduct as straying, in the sense of the Eleventh Collegiate's definitions (f) and (g) of the verb stray:



f : to wander accidentally from a fixed or chosen rout g : ERR, SIN



or lapsing, in the sense of the Eleventh Collegiate's definition 1(a) of the verb lapse:



to fall from an attained and usu. high level (as of morals or manners) to one much lower; also : to depart from an accepted pattern or standard.



You might even refer to yourself (for Biblical resonance) as "a prodigal not yet returned."


For these alternative terms to describe your situation more accurately than hypocrisy does, however, your conduct and your intentions must satisfy several crucial conditions: (1) an absence of feigning or false appearance, (2) a genuine belief in the rightness of the practice you have preached, and (3) a longing to return to proper practice that is strong enough to draw you back from your straying, lapse, or prodigality. And even if you do pass muster on those three criteria, if you continue to preach what you have ceased to practice during your period of erring conduct, without acknowledging and condemning the gap between your theory and your practice, the term hypocrisy still seems highly applicable to your situation.



At the level of everyday office procedures (for example), it might seem too harsh to characterize a boss who makes everyone else submit TPS reports with cover sheets but declines to follow that policy him- or herself as being hypocritical. But it certainly isn't too harsh to say that such a boss has a double standard. Again, from the Eleventh Collegiate:



double standard 2 : a set of principles that applies differently and usu. more rigorously to one group of people or circumstances than to another ...



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