Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, 2nd ed

Marilyn McEntyre

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467461696
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

With the pervasiveness of vitriol and dishonesty today, language needs to be revived and restored. In Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Marilyn McEntyre exposes the commercial and political forces that affect public discourse in American culture and counters with twelve constructive "strategies of stewardship"—such as challenging lies (including widely tolerated forms of deception and spin), fostering the art of conversation, and encouraging playfulness and prayerfulness in writing and speaking. The second edition of this timely and timeless book includes updated cultural references and questions for reflection and discussion at the end, allowing a new generation of readers to apply McEntyre's wisdom in a world that struggles with truth and graceful language more than ever before.

1

Love Words

My favorite scene in the 1987 movie Broadcast News is the moment when young Aaron, who has just graduated as valedictorian of his high school class, is attacked in the schoolyard after the ceremonies by two roughnecks whose object seems to be to show him who’s boss. As they run off, Aaron picks himself up and, considering how to deliver the unkindest cut possible, hollers after them by way of revenge, “You’ll never know the joy of writing a graceful sentence!”

Care of language begins in that experience of joy. Or simply in loving the graceful sentence—loving lines like Hopkins’s “He fathers forth whose beauty is past change” for their theological vision, or Frost’s “For I have had too much / Of apple-picking: I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired” for its quiet truth about the relinquishment that comes with age.¹ Loving the Jacobean elegance of “he maketh me to lie down in green pastures” enough not to forsake the King James Bible altogether; or Mary Oliver’s insistence that “each pond with its blazing lilies / is a prayer heard and answered lavishly …”²

We gather these gifts as we go along—lines from poems, verses from Scripture, quips, turns of phrase, or simply words that delight us. We use them in moments of need. We share them with friends, and we reach for them in our own dark nights. They bring us into loving relationship with the large, loose “communion of saints” who have written and spoken truths that go to the heart and the gut and linger in memory. Our task as stewards of the word begins and ends in love. Loving language means cherishing it for its beauty, precision, power to enhance understanding, power to name, power to heal. And it means using words as instruments of love.

Caring for words in this sense does not necessarily come with education. John McWhorter, whom I cited earlier, comments on the curious loss among literate Americans of affective relationship to words—attunedness to the aesthetic dimension of words themselves that would once have prompted compliments on a speaker’s “beautiful English.” “The French waiter who processes the smallest mistake as an injury to a precious artifact,” McWhorter writes, “has a conception of his language fascinatingly distinct from ours.”³ That conception is informed by the sense that the language is a national treasure, that its subtleties and nuances, its imbedded history and the sounds that bind its dialects to land and region are to be celebrated and protected and performed, like the music of Chopin or Debussy or Poulenc.

While every language offers unique avenues of understanding and is, linguists argue, adequate to its speakers’ needs, speakers of English can still, without undue pride, be grateful for the fact that we have at our disposal a repository of words and grammatical possibilities singularly enriched by the confluence of multiple language traditions—Latin, Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, French, and, more recently, the languages of colonized nations throughout the British Empire. With due recognition that English bears within it the marks of an imperial past and is heavily indebted to peoples whose language and other resources it has appropriated and controlled, we may still recognize the fact that this multiplicity of influences has given English “unparalleled subtlety and precision,”⁴ flexibility, and texture.

In America, however, gratitude for and pride in the language of Shakespeare and Tyndale compete with a curious anti-intellectualism, one manifestation of a false egalitarianism that mocks the objective of true equality. The dumbing-down, oversimplification, or flattened character of public speech may make declamations and documents more accessible, but it deprives us all of a measure of beauty and clarity that could enrich our lives together and, in many cases, protect us from consequential misunderstanding. In more and more venues where speech and writing are required, adequate is adequate. An exhilarating denunciation of rhetorical mediocrity can be found in Mark Twain’s acerbic little essay, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” in which he observes,

When a person has a poor ear for music, he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn’t say it. This is Cooper. He was not a word-musician. His ear was satisfied with the approximate word.⁵

Yet to choose to go beyond adequate is sometimes to risk accusations of elitism, pretentiousness, or pedantry.

Let us consider what “beyond adequate” looks like—what caring, careful, grateful, playful, joyful, loving use of words might entail and yield.

Some years ago I edited a little collection of essays called Word Tastings. The invitation to each contributor was to focus on a single word that he or she for any reason found intriguing, complex, haunting, curious, interestingly ambiguous, troubling, or delightful.

The essays were not academic, though some reflected on word history, usage, and lexical variations. Most of them served as reminders that the Oxford English Dictionary, used with the proper light touch, can be a source of entertainment, amusement, and surprise. These essays offered a surprising range of reflections on the richness and depth of ordinary words. I wanted to do a collection like this because it has been my experience that it is hard to get people to look at words instead of through them. When the collection came out, I began to hear from readers who, along with gratifying enthusiasm, wanted to share their own favorite words for future consideration. Everyone I heard from seemed to have a favorite word or two that merited discussion, opened floodgates of memory, or simply “tasted” good. “I don’t know why—I’ve always just liked that word,” people said about words as varied as sycophant, asteroid, obstreperous, and fleece.

These responses confirmed for me that there is, in all of us, a hunger for words that satisfy—not just words that do the job of conveying requests or instructions or information, but words that give a pleasure akin to the pleasures of music. Most of us, most of the time, use language the way we use windows; we look “through” words to ideas, objects, sensations, landscapes of meaning. Occasionally that window glass becomes a mirror, and hearing our own words, we suddenly recognize something about ourselves. And sometimes words become objects of interest in themselves. Suddenly we notice them. We see and hear them the way poets do, as having vitality and delightfulness independent of their utility. Language may suddenly appear not as a drably utilitarian system of reference, but as a dance—words at play—words not just meaning or reporting or chronicling or marching in syntactic formation, but performing themselves, sounding, echoing, evoking ripples of association and feeling, moving in curious sidelong figures rather than left to right in orderly lines. Freed of their quotidian functionality, words flit and land in odd places, or hover in the general vicinity of some thought that provides at best only a temporary resting place.

Thus at large, words, like smells, trigger memories. We all have a private vocabulary of words associated with particular significant moments. Psychoanalysts have built an empire on this truth simply by paying systematic attention to word associations and considering the immanent logic of the connections people make between one word and another. The fact that the word lilac recalls the wallpaper in a grandmother’s bathroom for one, a line from Whitman for another, or a feeling of inexplicable sadness for yet another testifies to the way words constellate complex, shifting, layered patterns of meaning and feeling.

Psychoanalysts aren’t the only ones who rely on this property of words for their stock in trade. Poets invite and enable us to hear old words new; they lure us to lower our defenses against the very associations words threaten to evoke. We expend, it seems, a good deal of mental energy daily keeping our filtering systems running, screening out the overtones, contaminants, stray bits of memory words carry. Pressed into conventional service day after day, words, like people, can diminish; they become weary; some drop out of service altogether. Only a poetic act can restore their natural versatility, virtuosity, and capacity to surprise.

The pleasure of a word is quite distinct from the pleasure of an idea. An assignment to write about the word piano is likely to take us down a very different path from an article on “the piano” (the history thereof, acoustics and soundboards, pianos I have known, and so on). Part of the pleasure lies in the way they stretch and accommodate: words never quite “fit” the concepts or experiences they represent. As Eliot reminded us, they “slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still.”⁶ Even words for solid, sensible objects—ball, saxophone, lake—become trailheads for surprising and circuitous journeys through history, memory, and the back roads of lexicography. But if those journeys leave readers “tasting” their own words, loving them for their pungency, their sharpness, their smoothness, or even their sting, then the dictionaries have served their purposes and something worthwhile has been preserved.

The pleasure of savoring words cannot be attained without some reclamation work. Words have to be “taken back,” brushed off, and sometimes healed. The business of reclaiming words from erosion or other damage might be seen as a project in species preservation. English—American English in particular, as we have said—has already suffered severe losses in a spreading epidemic of hyperbole. Streamlined and simplified popular media and textbooks have forced fewer and fewer words to serve the purposes of public discourse, so we sustain losses in nuance and precision whose consequences have not yet been fully recognized. As the internet opens up more independent avenues of discussion, more vigorous analysis and debate offsets some of the diminishments suffered by mainstream corporately controlled media. That is its own discussion, and a timely one. It’s clear that the internet is a two-edged and powerful tool, able to disseminate unprecedented amounts both of valuable information and of mis- or disinformation. Sorting becomes part of our responsibility as citizens, and we can’t do that alone; we need to be building circles of trust in which we sift and reflect on what we see. Some of this happens on social media, some of it in indispensable personal conversation among friends who keep each other accountable. In the course of all this, we exchange words, hone them for new uses, and dust off some that need to be repurposed for new circumstances—climate change, pandemic, shifting geopolitics, changing educational and social landscapes.

Reclamation is an important part of word work. When a word falls into disuse, the experience goes with it. We are impoverished not only by the loss of a precise descriptor, but by the atrophy and extinction of the very thing it describes. Think about grand old words like proper, prudent, sensible, noble, honorable, and merry. Have you ever heard a friend returning from a party describe how merry it was? Unless you’re very, very old, I suspect not. The word survives in American usage almost exclusively as a vestigial reminder of certain obligatory feelings of good cheer around Christmastime. But merriment itself seems to belong to a place beyond the looking glass—something we can imagine wistfully as we step into the world of Dickens but can’t bring back into the milieu of the contemporary cocktail party. Merriment seems to evoke two conditions of community life we have largely lost: a common sense of what there is to laugh about, and a certain mental health—what William James would have called “healthy-mindedness”—that understands darkness but doesn’t succumb to cynicism. Merriment has fallen into near extinction by a disuse that both signals and hastens the demise of such feelings. Wendell Berry’s writing offers examples of language reclaimed and put to good use for contemporary purposes. Without pretension he retrieves words like provident, kinsmen, courtship, mirth, and chastisement.

Let us pause here and reflect on one example of this kind of casualty. Felicity is a good case in point—a loss to the language of emotional life whose disappearance deprives us of a particular dimension of happiness. Felicity is a kind of happiness our culture does not, on the whole, promote: something like rational contentment, entailing acceptance, considered compromise, and self-knowledge. When Elizabeth Bennett, Jane Austen’s intelligent and critical-minded heroine, listens to her sister’s suitor pouring out his hopes for his own and his beloved’s happiness, the author writes of her,

she had to listen to all he had to say, of his own happiness, and of Jane’s perfections; and in spite of his being a lover, Elizabeth really believed all his expectations of felicity to be rationally founded, because they had for basis the excellent understanding, and superexcellent disposition, of Jane, and a general similarity of feeling and taste between her and himself.⁷

This kind of considered happiness, pursued with a clear eye toward economic stability, compatible temperament, and self-control, contrasts sharply with the kind of happiness marketed in movies that focus on falling in love against all odds, throwing caution to the winds, following the passions, and losing oneself in a rush of sensation. Felicity has more to do with finding oneself.

The word has a venerable history. From the Latin felix, it is linked in the liturgy of the Latin mass with the good that comes out of and in spite of evil: “O Felix culpa …”—“O blessed fault, O happy sin of Adam, that merited such a redeemer ….” In this instance, happiness is an unexpected gift, only recognized as happiness in long retrospect, ...