Words

They are funny things, those words. Anyone who travels to faraway places and has to live by gesturing instantly recognizes how critical they are. Sign language aside, words are critical to communication. It’s one thing to travel to Lithuania and see a sign you can’t quite understand; it’s something else to see a sign whose characters are not of your ken! Words are important. Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote “the pen is mightier than the sword” and we nod, because a man armed with the latter can kill only one at a time, but a man armed with the former can kill en masse.

At the same time, words are so commonplace we take them for granted. Writing well takes time and effort, while writing a lot is easy. The French polymath Blaise Paschal once ended a letter thus: “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” We downplay the effect of words: “Sticks & stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is a great children’s rhyme and terrible psychology. “Deeds not words” clearly places the active life as more important. Any police detective (or teacher, or priest, or . . .) can tell you that when we want to dissemble, we become voluble. That is, our lies involve more words than our truths. “Let your ‘yes’ mean ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ mean ‘no’; anything more is from the Evil One.”–Matthew 5:34.

Modern technology even fills in words for us–mostly wrong ones, to much hilarity. The Internet is a source of unending streams of words, including this blog. Twitter will test whether the natural process of evolution continues. It has reduced communication to cue-less, clueless tweets, where words are replaced by emojis, and emotions are more highly-prized than thoughts. It remains to be seen whether this particular advance in communication will be naturally selected to survive.

The power of words depends upon their meaning. After all, words are just collections of letters representing sounds. If we agree what a word means, we can use that understanding to accomplish much: to barter, to pray, to argue, to convince, to plead, to congratulate, to joke, to love. But only if we understand the words themselves, and they–the words–are not static. I think I first realized I was a conservative of sorts when I felt the keen desire to stand athwart the highway of progress and say “No further!” to ever-worse grammar and usage. The other day, I saw a reference to the enormity of a baseball stadium (“Why, was it Yankee stadium?” I mused). But awful used to mean “worthy of awe” and to fathom was to measure (the distance of one’s arms outstretched).

Some suggest that the hidden power of the English language is its ability to adapt: to change meaning as necessary, to borrow words and phrases from other languages, to make new words easily. I agree. Yet in the end all the flexibility and nuance and versatility must yield to one thing: meaning. And the meaning of words is a two-party action; are you inferring what I’m implying? I have never forgotten the Washington DC story about a guy who lost his District government job for using the word “niggardly” which a co-worker thought was a racial slur. The there’s this New York Times piece (a very interesting one about the Defund the Police effort in Minneapolis) that ends quoting an activist who uses they/their pronouns: as a result, it is impossible to understand what they meant or to whom they were referring!

It goes way beyond simple homonyms or even words with new, changed meanings. We give words meaning based on how we feel about who says them. Check out these quotes:

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

FDR, First Inaugural address

“We are at war, . . . I ask you to be responsible all together and not to give in to any panic”

Emmanuel Macron

“Don’t panic, but don’t think for a moment that he or she doesn’t really matter. No one is expendable. Everyone counts, it takes all our efforts.”

Angela Merkel

“Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it.”

Donald Trump

“Don’t Fear the Reaper”

Blue Oyster Cult

Okay the last one was just an excuse for a video, but hey, oddly appropriate, no?

In the cold spacing of text on the page, the quotes are quite similar. But how we interpret those quotes comes through a lens of exactly who said just what and when. The words matter, but just so. When the meaning of words becomes a point of contention, democratic discussion becomes difficult. If we can’t communicate, we can’t argue, we can’t even discuss, and we can’t ever agree.

I noticed this recently in a social media discussion spurred on by the Amy Coney Barrett nomination for the Supreme Court. And it bears on the meaning of the word “handmaid.” Some of my friends knew the word primarily from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and they inferred a negative connotation of feminine submission. Which is accurate IF your point of view stems from Atwood’s dystopian novel. But the word has a historical association which is positive, connoting agency demonstrated by willingness to align one’s will with God’s Will (To be concise, Adams’s sin was to place his will over God’s, while Mary’s fiat reordered mankind’s relationship with God back to what He originally intended). I’m not asking you to believe any of that, but you must acknowledge this other interpretation was the primary understanding of the term handmaid from antiquity until, oh, say 1985. If you hear the word handmaid and recoil, while I hear it and mutter “thanks be to God,” we’ll have trouble discussing it further.

Words matter. They can inspire people to do amazing things, or strike fear into the innocent heart. But only if we know what they mean. “I do” is a memorable phrase only if it means something more than “I do, mostly.” I wonder: is our societal stress caused by misunderstanding (willful or unintentional), or is the lack of agreement over meaning the symptom of that stress?