Listening

My grandson, at about 20 months, may be having some language delay problems. His mother is on top of it, so I know all will be well (good?), but it has me thinking about language and how it is both precious and dangerous. Language holds us together as family, as a society, as whatever community to which we may belong. But it also can wound or be misunderstood. My reaction, at least to spoken language, is to over explain if people do not seem to get what I have said. That my be the teacher in me. I believe I may also overdo it when I attempt to be neutral and cater to both sides of an issue. This is all the more ironic since I know, as a writing teacher, that language we put on a page can be the best of learning tools. I have no solution or conclusion--just the observations.

metaphor

Sitting in church this previous Sunday, it occurred to me that to be a Catholic, a person has to buy into metaphor. Think about how many gospel stories are just steeped in metaphor. Sunday's readings included a letter from Paul that spoke of the bread and wine being the Body and Blood of Christ but that also the participants in the Mass form the Body of Christ. so I was sitting there musing about how I am very willing to believe the Body and Blood of Christ is real in the Mass--no representation here but the actual physical reality. Then I started to question myself a bit. My take on the Mystical Body of Christ on earth in the physical reality of the Church is more to the metaphor side. And metaphor is representational. Some man says a woman is a fox and he means she has qualities of a fox. He knows she is not really the animal. So is Paul telling us that we are the Body, that as a group we do not just have qualities of Christness? If I say I am Christ to the world, I do not think of myself as God. We are trying to become divine. That is humanity's evolutionary path, but aren't we approaching that state rather than being in it? I think; therefore, I am confused.

Impact

Just when did impact become a verb for anything outside of medical/dental circles? I had a professor in grad school back in the '90s who was already disgruntled by the word's use, so it has been working its way into everyday conversation for a while. You know what I mean. "The shooting impacted the neighbors." I get this mental picture of neighbors all shoved together in a garage for safety--like teeth in a jaw with nowhere to go. The use of impact as a verb, really shorthand for make an impact, has to be directly attributed to news anchors. Again, like transparency and closure, the word impact sounds just a little more important that it really is, like the speaker knows just a little more than the listener or at least is in the know. He or she is in the club. It is similar to all the academic types who loved shifting paradigms back in the '90s. But, back to impact, I think I would like to coin a term ala Bucky of Darby Conley's Get Fuzzy when he came up with "verbify." In his case, he was talking about just what I am, the misuse, creation, or manipulation of words into roles where they do not belong. I would like to add the term mediafy. The definition is to verbify but only when done by, or at least lead by, the media. So this whole impact thing falls under mediafication. I feel really smart and smug right now, but my head hurts. I think I'll have a lie down.

philology

I was playing in the OED today. No telling what that may lead to, but I was interrupted somewhere between linguistic and morpheme. Language is pretty interesting stuff.

Another's Take on Language

According to “The Writer's Almanac” today, William H. Gass, an essayist and novelist born 30 July 1924, once wrote, "[Language] is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination." Just think of the power language has for the speaker or writer, all of that before meaning is even considered.

Semiotic Linguistic Stuff

As I try to wade through some of Derrida, I begin to wonder if we might not be going at this language thing from the wrong end (no suggested pun). Observing my 2 year old granddaughter Maeve communicate, I appreciate the simplicity of getting meaning across: "M'poop in da pot," speaks volumes, especially when expressed proudly via telephone. Someone might comment that I don't get it, but I fully discern the grammar, logic, and rhetoric of that sentence; the meaning is crystal clear.