For the Love of Language
Today I was reveling in the sumptuous language of a newsletter I receive called The Marginalian by Maria Popova. This edition was a special one offering up her “Favorite Children's Books of 2023 — tender reckonings with friendship, fear, love, solitude, black holes, time, and the interconnectedness of life”. As I savored not just the beautiful images of the books she chose to highlight, but the exquisite languaging she chose to describe those books, I pondered language and our use of it. Words have power. They can change our perspective, incite a riot, wound others deeply, draw people close, create understanding, and so much more. Yet we often use language with little attention to the impact created.
What if we were all more cognizant of the effects of our chosen words? Would we choose differently? Would we become more masterful in how we wield language? Sharon Ellison, in her remarkable book, Taking the War Out of Our Words, states in her Introduction, “I suddenly had a vivid picture of how people use defensiveness as their way of protecting themselves when they talk to each other…What I was teaching was a method of communication in which people would not have to resort to defensiveness to protect themselves…Our language prescribes being defensive as our primary means of self-protection and thus leads us directly into power struggle.”
In what appears to me to be the human equivalent of the fish being unaware of the ocean in which they swim, we view our languaging as normal because it’s what we know. We don’t question how our rules of English language may actually be setting us up unwittingly for conflict and discontent. We toss off phrases such as “She’s fighting cancer” and “I’ll conquer this yet!” without any awareness of how this sets up conflict, a battle stance, division rather than connection. I think it would be very interesting to interview people who are bilingual and see if they notice a qualitative difference in the war-like nature of the English language vs. whatever other language they speak.
My modest hope for this blog post is to stir some awareness within us of the language choices we make and how those choices impact our connectedness to others. My big hope is that this stirs enough curiosity in some of us to actually acquire Ellison’s book and begin to explore this “ocean” in which we swim. Even a small modification can pave the way for smoother communication with others and a burgeoning love affair with language.