A Blog About Using Words Well
(What Goes On In My Brain)
I think about words a lot. Plenty. All the time. I listen to them being spoken and I read them in books and articles and emails.
I do this in part because I am an aspiring author, but also partly because I love words. They’re fascinating. In their auditory incarnation, these little blips of sound are used to communicate ideas and emotions. They are imbued with the extraordinary power to hurt or heal, to teach and also to destroy. They can be so mundane at times, but they are a powerful and immediate medium of connection between all of us. Spoken words are so magical, so compelling, so influential, and yet they are, most of the time, ephemeral. I think of great speeches that have imported our nation and the entire globe. So powerful! I also think of words my father spoke only to me that were just as impactful in my life.
Words spoken can strike with blunt force or carry incredible nuance. The same identical set of spoken words can mean many different things, all depending on the tones, the inflections, and rhythms of the speaker’s voice. The possibilities and variations are endless.
In their written iteration, they become repositories of knowledge, the tellers of stories, the source of news and current information. What one person writes can be communicated to hundreds, thousands, and millions of readers, not just in the moment, but in perpetuity. We do not need to be present when the words are written or even at the same stroke of history to feel them, absorb them.
Almost all of the aggregated knowledge of the human race is captured somewhere by a series of arbitrary glyphs designed solely and explicitly to give words more permanency, just so that they can preserve ideas. All hail to Books! We even have collections of words that are used to describe and define…words.
Whether written or spoken, words themselves are artificial, abstract. They acquire meaning and reality only through agreed upon conventions. They aren’t universal; there are many different languages, each with its own set of rules and a community that has, at least tacitly, agreed to use a set of sounds and letters to mean the same thing across the whole set of users. Words are so important that deaf communities have invented sets of hand signs to represent words, letters, and language. But the way we combine them creates, not just simple communication, but subtle and endlessly nuanced connections between people, regardless of language. Simply put, Words Matter.
My love of words doesn’t make me an expert, just opinionated. I realize that being forcefully and passionately opinionated is often mistaken for expertise, just as the person with the loudest voice is often mistaken for the smartest person in the room or the Oval Office. I may not claim expertise, but neither am I ignorant. I’m not an English major, although I did take a poetry class once, but I was very well trained in the use of language. I may not always remember the parts of speech or how to diagram a sentence, but I can recognize eloquent speaking when I hear it and powerful writing when I see it. Conversely, I hear and see mistakes in both spoken and written words; they grind against my nerves like fingernails on chalkboards, a medium invented primarily to hold words.
I also realize that we are living in a linguistically dynamic society and that word meanings can change rapidly. I might mourn the transformation of the word meme itself into a broad cultural phenomenon, but I accept it, and I can learn how to use it in its new contextual skin. I remember being delighted to learn what the new internet word ‘bloviate’ meant, and how chagrined I was to realize that it could often be applied to me.
The way we treat gender and sexual orientation linguistically is shifting right along with social attitudes. It’s too early to tell whether this emerging vocabulary will become permanent, but the fact that there is a widespread effort to embed this new vocabulary into our language as the default speech pattern suggests that it certainly might become permanent.
Semantics and syntax evolve, too. Our entire grammatical foundation is so subject to change that we constantly have newly invented slang and shorthand speech patterns rising and falling, many of which do not last for long. But some do, and they work their way into mainstream speech to become permanent.
But sloppy usages, poor grammar, and limited and inaccurate vocabularies bother me, even though they can result in unintended humor. For example, claiming one is a “Stable Genius” evokes a mental image of someone who is an undisputed expert in shoveling sh*t. And while the speaker didn’t intend that message, it is bizarrely accurate as a metaphorical descriptor of the speaker.
Our language possesses a vast depth, and I try to utilize that depth in my writing. As a storyteller, I want to conjure up rich and meaningful mental images in my audience, to encourage their imaginations to dance. As a social commentator, I desire to thoughtfully illuminate points that are being obscured or trampled by the misuse of words. I’ll make my share of mistakes, I promise.
Personally, I want to grow as a writer and to become better at using words to inspire and educate. I hope you enjoy what I write or perhaps even hate it. I mostly hope you don’t find it boring.
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