Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective.
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.
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.