The POWER of WORDS

by Leigh Lundin

My parents were farmers. My father, Beryl, was 6’4, 240 pounds, broad-shouldered, and was known for his formidable strength. Hillis was barely 5 feet tall, and while she was pretty and petite, she had the persistence and pugnaciousness of a terrier, or perhaps a holy terror.

At first blush, you might think my mother was the wordmaster. The daughter of lineage of schoolteachers, she loved to write, and Lord, did that woman like to talk. With my Dad being a big, slow-talking guy, she could easily fit a couple of paragraphs between any two of his words. But that first glimpse might have been misleading, because my Dad thought carefully about what he said.

Besides being a farmer, he was also a self-taught scientist, engineer, philosopher, and aficionado of the arts. On Sundays, he listened to baseball followed by opera. Most of the farmhouse office was a library, loaded with Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Omar Khayya¡m, Giovanni Boccaccio, William Shakespeare, and Geoffrey Chaucer. He had dozens of books on art, anthropology, religion, and philosophy, not to mention cabinets overflowing with Scientific American, Psychology Today, and other subscriptions.

Theorem I.

My dad occasionally made startling pronouncements that at first blush seemed to make little sense. In one of the earliest discussions I remember, he said it wasn’t possible for the human mind to grasp infinity (?) nor the universe in its physical entirety. Certainly, we could grasp the edges of it and mathematically we could describe it, but a finite mind can not conceptualize infinity itself. What lives at the edge of space? Why more space, of course. If you try to think of the largest possible number, it’s still not infinity, because you could always double it, square it, or merely add one to it. Mathematicians simply visualize it as approaching negative zero. You grok negative zero, right?

Theorem II.

Beryl contended that it was nearly impossible to wrap the brain around any concept until you developed the vocabulary (including picture vocabulary) to understand it. That seems counterintuitive; after all, the first time a toddler sees a car, his childish brain records it long before he knows the word for it. But what if a child was raised in the Amazon forests and you wished to explain a car to him? Or, imagine quark theory, the sub-subatomic particles. Most of us non-scientists think of those orbiting electrons that make up hi-tech logos, but we have absolutely no idea what any of it means in a practical sense. And logos, they’re also a language.

A famous anecdote involved one of the chimps who had been taught sign language in the 1970s. Once the study was complete, the chimpanzee was placed in a general zoo population, where zoologists were surprised to discover that it began to teach other chimps sign language. It also began to make up it’s own words. The first time it saw a duck, it called it a “water bird”.

Theorem III.

Another assertion Beryl made is that you cannot think of a negative until you first think of its positive. If you’re instructed to think of a color that’s not black, in your mind you first picture black. You can’t help it; we’re wired that way. Thus, when someone shouts, “Don’t hit that pedestrian,” there’s a fractional delay because your brain’s first thought is, “hit that pedestrian!” followed by “not”.

Theorem IV.

In the days before political correctness, my Dad’s most chilling pronouncement made no sense to me as a mere teenager, even after I read 1984, but now, his wisdom seems obvious. It was, “If you can control a population’s vocabulary, you can control the people.” We see such control constantly in political correctness and in advertising. We hear it in pejoratives. Think about the name-calling of homosexuals, and the transformation of the mindset from the slur ‘queer’ to the lighter, happy sound of ‘gay’. The reshaping of the language helped shape opinion. Even the construction of ‘homophobic’ literally means “fear of sameness”. What big, burly, virile man will admit to fear of anything?

We particularly see word-mangling in politics. Our thinking is transmogrified by sound bytes. Isn’t a “preventive war” actually a real war? When our closest allies tried to warn us against a foolish dalliance in Iraq, we turned on them and called them cowards and smugly referred to greasy potatoes as “freedom fries”, in a war of words toward a Machiavellian purpose. Lately, our politicians argued against using the word “insurgents”, as it implies a rebellious populace who want to eject “invaders” from their country.

Talk radio and the political shout programs have the curious distinction that after listening, you actually know less than before. On these programs, we are bombarded by a constant muddying of words, the co-option of “conservative” when propagandists don’t want you to hear “right wing”. When “liberal” might sound too much like enlightened, it’s better to impute “left wing” or “socialist”, but only if you can’t quite get away with using “communist”. Such terms, left and liberal, conservative and right, are not synonymous, as libertarians like to tell you. Then, you have to further define whether the subject is political, social, religious, or economic. After all, it’s hardly unusual to find people who are, say, politically liberal and economically conservative.

Our nation’s truncated left wing, numbering in the tens of… tens, is as guilty as our ultra-right, but the right wing has the numbers. It’s amazing (and scary) to hear a rancorous Sean Hannity berate opponents of the US PATRIOT Acts I and II as being traitorous, unpatriotic, anti-American leftists, which, by implication, must include civil libertarians and such conservatives as the great William F. Buckley, Jr. who has spoken out against the acts. After verbally shredding the Iraq Study Group’s report, Hannity dismissed its authors as old-time Republican liberals, which must have come as a surprise to George Bush, Sr.’s former officials.

A few weeks ago, I finally caught one of the political debates, and at the bottom of the screen, Fox News displayed the tally of how the audience ranked the candidates. The candidate who made the most sense was Texas congressman Ron Paul who had the audacity to speak his mind. The audience responded, giving him as much as 30% of their vote. And then, a curious thing happened: Rudy Giuliani, frothing with mock indignation, put words in Paul’s mouth.

Following the debate, Fox pundits put Giuliani, Romney, and McCain ahead– anybody but Ron Paul, and yet, there at the bottom of the screen, the audience wasn’t fooled, still giving Ron Paul 30% of their vote. The next morning, talk radio variously declared either Giuliani or Romney the winner, and if Ron Paul was mentioned at all, it was that Giuliani had kicked his ass for being soft on terrorism, completely ignoring what Ron Paul actually had said. It left the feeling that a decision had been made to cap Ron Paul, and there wasn’t much he could do about it, unless the voters had actually heard what he had said and made their own decisions. (I’m not endorsing any candidate, nor am I implying I’m Republican (or Democrat). I’m actually (big surprise) independent. I just happened to catch that one debate.)

The grandmaster of talk radio is Paul Harvey. His voice was a part of my childhood, and I can still hear him on cold winter mornings back then: “Page 2 ………. Motor Honey.” He was as much a master of the pause, as he was the spoken word.

He had a kindness, a goodness that seems missing from other talk hosts today, our crop of political propagandists who, when caught out, dismiss their own errors as “political entertainment”. In contrast, Paul Harvey put away verbal weapons and used words to find the good in people. He once said that while most people view him as conservative, his actual political feelings vary according to the topic and the cause, and that no party has more than half the answers.

In the end, isn’t that what we want from words? Not to control thinking, but to enhance the mind and improve the human condition.