From the Archives: On Language

So, family is visiting. My niece is adorable, and we had a lovely romp in the backyard. However, I don’t have time to write. I originally wrote this for https://thestoryclub.locals.com/

Language, a powerful thing, directs and refines thought. Without language, our minds may shine with all the brilliance of the sun, they may illumine many things, but like the sun, the dawn of the unfocused light rises to go down again unto dusk. Language, I say, is like Edison’s light, an admitted imitation of something far grander, but it is still the grandest means of battling the night. More so, let me suggest that, since we often depict our thoughts and ideas not as the sun but rather as a lightbulb switching on above our heads, let us say then that language is better thought of as a laser, or better yet, a lightsaber, for language cuts.

Here then, I should say, as a Christian, and especially as one raised protestant, this subject verges into my religion, for we believe that reality at bottom is language: In the Pentateuch, God creates by speaking, and in the Gospel according to John, the word of God is God, that is, the only way men know God is through God’s word. (Oi, I’m going to get myself into trouble here. I’m grossly simplifying this bit of theology. I fear the grumbling accusation of heretic!) The point being, like the Christian paradox of the Trinity, so too, to paraphrase Saint John, language is with thought, and language is thought. It is congruently true that our thoughts are language and yet our thoughts are represented in language. Or to make one more parallel with the Gospel (Do they still burn heretics?), no man has thought a thought, but symbols have made thoughts known.

If anyone is still with me after all that, congratulations. (I have read the above paragraph many times now, and I wish someone would tell me what I am on about.) This is all my roundabout way of getting to a point made by an American humorist named James Thurber. In his book, Lanterns and Lances, Thurber ends chapter 14, The New Vocabularianism, by waking his wife with the declaration, “What does he know of English who only English knows?” Thurber writes, “In my day, Latin was taught in high schools to prepare the youthful mind for the endless war between meaning and gobbledegook.” It is not Latin, per se, which Thurber champions, but language as a means to mental discipline. Latin was dropped not because it was archaic, but because it was hard. Difficult subjects “were simply too hard for Junior and his sister to understand, and interfered with the coziness of their security.”

I think Thurber has his tongue pretty firmly set within his cheek, but the point the chapter makes is serious: There are two ways of using language. A certain type of man engages in sloganeering, and his words mean pretty much nothing. They are not even meant to mean anything, and anything they mean they mean by accident; they are spoken to pursue an effect; the syllables this man sputters are a sort of hypnotism or incantation. Thurber remarks how Latin is even used in this way by the educated who want to brandy about complicated words for commonplace things. They dress themselves in an abundance of syllables.

I have made only the meanest study of Latin, though I keep promising myself that I will knuckle down and really learn it . . . eventually. I have, however, made a somewhat more substantial study of Biblical Hebrew and Koine Greek. (Guess which languages were offered at my college?) I will testify to the general wisdom that in studying other languages I have discovered a deeper knowledge of my own.

Language, a powerful thing, is difficult. It is easy to give into the spirit of the age and spout the words that sound good and are likely to receive applauds; it is much harder to sit down with Socrates and have him tear apart your definitions of love and virtue. Language, a powerful thing, can be used as Thurber sees it used, clever slogans shortcutting thought, but Language, a powerful thing, can be used to create a world.

How do you use language?