I Can See Your House From Here - Archives
vol 2 number 47
The power of words is a wondrous and amazing thing. Words are something that we take for granted, I think -- on a day to day basis, the average person puts no more care or thought into what they're saying than into what they'll wear to work or eat for lunch. And yet, clothing and appetites are not apt to cause war or divorce, seduce a potential mate, get you beaten by a mob or saved from a beating. Words, in a way, are more powerful than any weapon, any drug, any thing you can imagine.
Words are the tangible representation of thoughts, ideas; a way to communicate things that a person is thinking or feeling. It's not the ideas that I want to concentrate on, though -- of course it hurts to find out that your friends hate your music, or that you look fat in that dress, or that your husband has been sleeping with the babysitter, or that God is dead. But the way that these things are communicated can make a lot of difference -- little white half-truths, blunt force trauma, following the negative with a positive. It's one thing to tell your girlfriend that her new dress is a little tight around the hips (but damned if it doesn't show off your legs, honey!), and another altogether to wonder aloud what kind of fabric doesn't tear under such insane stress.
Words can tell a lot about someone. A person's vocabulary can immediately reveal -- though not with certainty -- their intelligence, their upbringing, their nationality or cultural base, their educational background. Most of us had grandmothers or mothers that were quick to point out that curse words were the sign of a person of little or no class; a friend's father used to tell us that only stupid people used four letter words, because they didn't have a strong enough vocabulary to do otherwise. While most of us would argue the patent untruth of thsoe thoughts, the use of curse words (as well as the proficiency of use) says something to each of us about someone that we've never or only just met. Ditto certain trendy bits of slang, like "hip" or "groovy" or "phat" or "geeked." If you find someone who consistently refers to women as bitches, or Irish people as Micks, or white people as crackers, it should tell you a lot about them. Same goes for people that seem incapable of speaking or writing to you with any less than three syllable words, by the way.
Vocabulary is a powerful tool for a lot of jobs -- any sort of interpersonal relationships, for that matter. If you're a salesman, you'd best know how to not only speak on the level of your customer, but how to listen to their words to determine their level. A help-desk worker needs to be able to rephrase a simple instruction in many ways, in case the person on the other end of the phone doesn't understand. Doctors and lawyers have to take high-level information and relate it to common people. Teachers need to be able to explain concepts in a number of ways, because no two students are the same. If you're a writer -- well, this goes without saying, right?
Writers are the most challenged in the artistic world; their work strikes you on only one level, and it's up to your imagination to do the rest. A good writer tickles the imagination, inspiring you to picture every detail (whether described or not), and helps that process along by building so much of the picture with accuracy and detail and brevity. A bad writer can not only keep you from having any interest in believing what he's saying, but can flip the switch and turn your land of make-believe off altogether. Filmmakers and artists paint what they want you to see; musicians give you what they want you to hear. Writers give you a blueprint with very specific instructions, but it's up to you to build the final product.
Some words are dull, nearly meaningless from overuse. Replace "ran" with "sprinted" or "dashed"; use "slaughtered" instead of "killed." Some words are useless out of context -- "hammered" to some means drunk, feeling bad to others, and a construction job to the rest. A lot of words are culturally based, perhaps even shared by no more than a circle of friends. Likewise, my telling a Frenchman to "take a shower" might be absolutely pointless, if he has no comprehension of English.
But words are only as powerful as the listener allows. There are some listeners, like the Frenchman above, who simply will never understand what you've said without the help of a translator of some sort (and after being filtered, whether through a person or a dictionary, words lose some of their power). Most five-year-olds will look at you blankly if you tell them to be quiet because you have a hangover; most adults of any culture will wince and offer to call your next-of-kin for you. A grown person might choose to read Dickens or Fitzgerald or Austen; most high school students will miss the story out of spite.
And then there's the conscious allowance. Some people won't enjoy a Dickens story, no matter how off-beat it might be, because they hate the language and won't give it a chance. If you use too many curse words in your daily patois, you're guaranteed to lose some people's ear -- not because your message isn't important, but because they've decided that you're not worth listening to. There's the little boy who cried wolf, whom no one believes any more. The minorities that have no problem with ethnic slurs or jokes told at their expense -- because they're only words, after all. Sticks and stones, and all that...
I've been a believer in mathematical theory for a long time now -- the thought that the secrets of the universe are all based on numbers. Someday, someone will figure out the formula for prime numbers, or solve Pi, and the cosmos will unfold itself before us. It's pretty important to me, obviously, that math is a focal point in schools. But I wonder more and more if English (pick another language, if you choose -- just remember the story of the Tower of Babel) shouldn't be the priority. After all, what good will it do you to discover the secrets of life if you can't make people understand them?
Kenn McCracken's just another word for nothing left to read.