Words Matter

I guess it’s pretty obvious by now that I think words are important. Before I ever even had the desire or ability to analyze why, I realized that beautiful words can move us and give us great pleasure.

They can inspire us to praise . . . GLORY be to God for dappled things—For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow . . . .

They can give us courage . . . Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. . . .

They inspire us . . . And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

They make us smile . . . Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

Words are wonderfully powerful. But that power is not always used in ways that ennoble us as human beings. Christa Tippett, creator of MPR’s radio show Speaking of Faith, says in her recent book:

“I’m committed as a journalist to political neutrality. . . . I’m profoundly disturbed by the language of ‘collateral damage’ which has been invoked most recently by a Republican administration. But I hear it as a symptom of a larger tendency, across the liberal-conservative spectrum in this country, to describe our enemies as less than human. Since shortly before the 9/11 attacks, the notion of ‘hunting down’ terrorists has become accepted lingo. In Abu Ghraib, tortured prisoners were posed as animals. Those soldiers and commanders were unconsciously emboldened, I am sure, by language of less-than-humanness that has become routine in our political life and on the pages of liberal as well as conservative papers of record. And yet this mode of attack is doomed to failure, certainly against our current enemies.”

Tippett is right, and she is not alone in her views. Thomas Vincent, in his article, “Dangerous Words," explains, “It is dangerous enough when we use iconic words that have evolved naturally in our language. But when such words are created out of whole cloth by governments the phenomenon takes on truly Kafkaesque dimensions.”

We have examples from history of how control of language can change minds and then behavior: “Many commentators have noted that in order to murder their victims, the Nazis had to murder the German language first, associated as it was with high culture, rationality, and philosophical thought. A new, degraded form of German came into being, first in Germany itself, then in the camps, where it found its most brutal expression. . . . It is an obvious observation that where violence is inflicted on man, it is also inflicted on language.” Thus we have the Final Solution, and “medical experiments,” and Arbeit Macht Frei.

Published in 1949, George Orwell, in his novel 1984, examines the negative power of language. The purpose of Newspeak, his fictional language, is to control the way people think and behave by controlling the words they use, their vocabulary. Lois Lowry’s young adult novel, The Giver, is also about a dystopia that uses language to deliberately cloud meaning, thereby controlling citizen’s behavior and shaping their reality.

As children, we were taught the chant, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” and repeating this phrase might have increased our courage in the face of verbal abuse, but as a maxim for life, it falls woefully short. I think the wise man Solomon more truly understood how much words matter: “The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.” (Proverbs 18:21)