I think words are important. This is, perhaps, an unusual trait – even many of those who make their living with words seemingly have little respect or affection for them. Often we treat words with contempt, as imperfect vessels for conveying ideas to one another – but they do much more than that. That very imperfection allows for ambiguity, complexity, and nuance which can make ideas much more complex and interconnected than they might at first appear.
The way I express this belief in conversation, though, often comes across as a young man’s game of trying to establish conversational dominance. I am constantly trying to drill down into the specific meanings of words, what they are intended to express, what they come to mean to those who read or hear them, how they fall short of or supersede their intended purpose. I ask these questions all the time of myself, but when I apply this perspective in conversation people often find it annoying – because when you ask these questions it sounds like you’re trying to catch people out, to pick a semantic argument, to show what a big smarty-pants you are. This is particularly frustrating because I used to be that smarty-pants, and have tried very hard to abandon those pants. However, because these questions of semantics and what they express are still ones I believe to be important and interesting, I find myself perceived by others as that regrettable past self again and again.
Why are these semantics important to me? The words we use provide a glance at our mental model of the world around us. By paying close attention to the words people use and how they use them, we can derive information about how they view the world – but, perhaps more importantly, we can turn this lens on ourselves, note the words that come out of our own mouths, and glean information about what we think, how we see things, what we believe, and how we’re primed to express those beliefs. The relationship between words and beliefs isn’t just one way, though, not simply belief springing forth from the lips in the shape of words – we can also choose to think about the words we use, think about what they mean and why we use them, and by changing the way we speak we can affect change on those internal models.
In other words, if we change the way we talk and write, we also change the way we think. We’re all telling stories about our lives, so we have to take editorial control, to take care in how those stories are expressed. Or, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
This is formative of my sense of humor. I love double meanings, creative reinterpretations, extended byzantine analogies, and making up absurd descriptive neologisms. When you operate in the realm of ideas, these kinds of word play become very powerful, a way of fusing metaphors together into complex systems where everything is symbolically and meaningfully interconnected, where every observation can have many meanings and any one of them can be a powerful message. All of this may sound trivial or twee, but many of these tools of colloquial confluence and ambiguity can also be used in far less humorous ways: Dogwhistles, veiled threats, and plausibly deniable racism.
The reason that people can get away with these violent forms of ‘word-play’ is because we don’t take words seriously. To believe that words are important is to also believe that they can be dangerous. Incitements, slurs, dehumanizing language, these can hide anywhere – and, though many recent examples are anything but subtle, what has allowed the huge and obvious versions of these violent words to flourish today is the absence of scrutiny applied to the nicely-phrased and polite forms of bigotry which we customarily embrace.
Words have power, and can do great harm if we don’t respect them. If one dwells on this too much, it could lead one to never speak at all. This is something I struggle with. Starting this blog was a big step for me in becoming confident in my words and their meaning and relevance – but continuing it has been a weekly struggle in convincing myself that what I’m saying is non-obvious and also non-gibberish, that we wouldn’t all be better off if I just kept it to myself, and that whatever half-ignorant thing I say this time (because I believe even the best of us seldom manage better than half-ignorance) won’t do more harm than good.
It’s a leap of faith.
Every time I try to say something new, though, I feel like I must leap further, and it becomes harder to express the idea I’m holding in my mind. I already feel as though many of these posts must border on nonsense to many readers, that only a few people see the world similarly enough to the way I do that these descriptions and analogies make sense. I worry that I’m writing in another language that only I speak. Even voicing this concern sounds self-aggrandizing, as though I must believe I’m such a unique and extraordinary thinker that no one really ‘gets’ me – but I’m just worried I spend so much time in my own head that I may forget how to actually communicate with another human being.
I guess everyone writes in their own language, though, and everything we read is just a translation. Sometimes the idea carries across. Sometimes it does not. This is why I take care to pick the most precise and descriptive words that I can, to carve out as much precision as I can manage. Without that precision, whatever you read, it won’t be what I meant to write, only what you’re expecting to see.