A version of this essay was published in the San Antonio Express-News, August 13, 2024. A-11.
Like breathing, we don’t generally think deeply about the words we use in normal communication.
Yet there is something basic about connecting the words people express and the health of the cultural world in which they live.
The origin of the word “word” is fascinating. In Old English, “wurda,” and even earlier, “were,” meant “to speak or say. “When we think of where we directly address words, we find numerous examples: “It’s his word against mine, “to break one’s word,” “in the beginning was the Word,” ‘to put words into someone’s mouth,” “may I have a word with you?” and “one is as good as their word.”
Words are a guide. I begin each day by journaling about the day before. It’s as if I cannot make sense of what happened unless I submit it to words. Only then do yesterday’s events rise to another level of reality.
Psychologist James Hillman has written: “Speech and myth are one and the same.” What we do to soil and stain speech directly affects the shared mythology owe live by. To debase or trivialize speech is to diminish and tarnish the myth we share. Democracy as our shared myth is then abused; if the abuse is repeated endlessly, to the undiscerning audience it becomes reality. The result is a further erosion and corrosion of what holds us together in a common good.
For a current example: I listened recently to Donald Trump answer questions at a Mar-a-Lago news conference, his first. Most often, instead of answering questions from reporters directly with specifics, he used their inquiries to launch vitriolic invectives against his political opponents. His vocabulary was demeaning and enraged: “crooked Hilary” “stupid Joe,” the worst president in history, “Gavin Newscum,” Kamala Harris “is not bright, cannot hold a news conference, ruined San Francisco, ruined California, . . . “World War Three is imminent if I lose.”
I felt I was in the presence of a man both enraged and deranged, without boundaries, lashing out at whatever crossed his mind with no logical sequence or point accept to attack others with untruths, fantasies of world doom, an obsession with crowd sizes that put his crowds in the history books as the largest that have ever gathered.
I was unsettled as well by the narrow bandwidth of his vocabulary that in his self-praise, never reached beyond “incredible,” “unbelievable,” and “never before in history has this happened,” and other blusters that felt like a person in desperate need of feeling the approval of others. His oscillations between blame and self-praise were mind-numbing.
Of course we can grow numb to words, to slogans, to cliches emanating from personal fantasies. Therein lies its danger for individuals and for the cultural health of a nation.
Words themselves are prostituted to serve a frantic ideology shared by a few, not the many. Such an ideology divorces us from a shared communal sense of what is real and beneficial for the greatest number. In its place a dead myth attempts to pass for what is true.
The upshot of such a shift is that the distortions, lies and untruths can infect and reshape our world; they deform, divide, and deflect us from our shared humanity. Look closely at the words used in political discourse; there you will see a mirror of the world shaped or misshaped by such rhetoric.
Seeing this clearly is the first step toward tempering the tantrums of distortion by reclaiming the truth we share. Our well-being depends on it.