The funny thing about language is that we accept the language of violence, and are shocked by the language of love, sex, and passion.
Last night, I watched Stephen Fry (@StephenFry) on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (@CraigyFerg), in an audience-free show where the two chatted for almost an hour about some intelligent stuff. That’s when Fry said something that — to me, the wordsmith — just floored me.
If an alien was looking down on us, and inspecting our language, they would see that the worst thing we do on this planet is we torture, we kill, we abuse, we harm people. We’re cruel. And those are the things at which we should be ashamed. Amongst the best things we do is we breed children, we raise them, we make love to each other, we adore each other, we’re affectionate and fond of each other. Those are the good things we do.
They would say that how odd that the language for the awful things we use casually. ‘Oh the traffic was agony, it was hell, it was cruel, it was torture waiting in line.’ We use words like ‘torture.’ That’s the worst word.
And yet, if we use the F-word, which is the word for generating our species, for showing physical affection one to another, then we’re taken off air and accused of being wicked and irresponsible and a bad influence to children.
Words have power. They have impact. If I call you a rotten f—er (see, I can’t even use the word, because I might offend someone), that has real power. It’s a verbal slap to the face, soon to be followed by a real one.
But if you’re giving me hard time and I say, “you’re killing me,” we laugh at that, like it’s somehow funny that your minor inconveniences are going to result in my eventual death.
We can’t talk about the creation of life, or the affirmation of life, without howls of outrage, but it’s all right, even funny, to talk about the harm and destruction of it.
Don’t get me wrong, I love dark comedy and morbid humor. There’s something liberating to be able to laugh at the things that scare us. But there’s a line I don’t like to cross, and I’ve been thinking for a few months about where that line is.
It’s somewhere around the phrase, “drink the Kool-Aid.” We use that phrase in business without a thought. It means undying loyalty. If you “drink the company Kool-Aid,” you’re a company man through and through. You’ve bought into management’s vision, and you’ll follow it to The Bitter End. We throw this phrase around without a thought.
I was 11 years old when Jonestown happened. I remember the footage and photos of the bodies. I remember grownups talking about it. In some ways, it’s all the more shameful for us Hoosiers, because Jim Jones got his start right here in Indianapolis. (Click the link above if you’ve never heard the story.)
So I don’t say “drink the Kool-Aid” at all. It’s a horrible phrase about a horrible event created by a horrible man. And to toss it around like a punchline, a throwaway phrase to use in a motivational speech, is repugnant.
And this one phrase illustrates Fry’s point so well: we casually throw around the language of violence like it’s no big deal.
But we get embarrassed and throw a royal fit when a woman’s nipple is shown on national TV for a fraction of a second. We’re upset by a brief glimpse of a small segment of a woman’s body, yet we think nothing of talking about torture — the “worst word,” Fry called it — and suicide bombings and war and beheadings on the evening news while our kids are in the room. That’s somehow okay, but we fine TV stations millions of dollars because Janet Jackson got a little extra publicity.
(Now, I understand your initial reaction might be to talk about the rampant over-sexuality of our culture, and how our kids shouldn’t be exposed to that sort of thing. And I won’t disagree with you a single bit. Frankly, I don’t want my kids seeing Janet Jackson’s nipple during the Super Bowl either. But that’s not my point. So, if that’s your response, then you’ve completely missed the boat. Go back to the beginning and start over.)
My point is that language is powerful. One of the most powerful weapons we have. It cannot be used casually. We shouldn’t toss words around without thinking about the meaning behind them.
In social media circles, we talk about the creation and exchanging of ideas. Yet language is the biggest, most important idea — ideal? — of all. To treat it so thoughtlessly harms it. It reduces our values and ideals to afterthoughts and punchlines.
Here’s the segment of Fry and Ferguson’s conversation. The quote above comes at around the 8:00 mark, but it’s worth watching the entire thing.
About the Author: Erik Deckers Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
I love language, and I’m a stickler for grammar and punctuation. I don’t always know the names of the rules, or how to diagram a sentence, but I know what’s right, and what’s not.
So as a professional wordsmith, and self-confessed know-it-all, I want to explode five common grammar myths I hear rather frequently.
You can’t end your sentences with a preposition: According to Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette, hosts of at A Way With Words, an NPR radio show for Word Nerds, this is a tired old proscription dating back from the 17th century.
A key point, you might say the Quick and Dirty Tip, is that the sentence doesn’t work if you leave off the preposition. You can’t say, “What did you step?” You need to say, “What did you step on?” to make a grammatical sentence.
I can hear some of you gnashing your teeth right now, while you think, “What about saying, ‘On what did you step?’”
But really, have you ever heard anyone talk that way? I’ve read long, contorted arguments from noted grammarians about why it’s OK to end sentences with prepositions when the preposition isn’t extraneous (1), but the driving point still seems to be, “Nobody in their right mind talks this way.” Yes, you could say, “On what did you step?” but not even grammarians think you should.
Alford published a grammar book in 1864, A Plea for the Queen’s English, where he used several Latin rules to create English rules, like the idea that the word “to” is part of an infinitive, and thus should be inseparable. O’Connor’s book is much bigger and more popular, and she says Alford is dead wrong.
Part of the problem is that infinitives in Latin are single words, while they’re two words in English: to go, to run, to lift, to look. Alford figured if they can’t be split in his dead language of choice, they shouldn’t be split in the language everyone else was using.
Look, English isn’t Latin, so we shouldn’t be bound by rules that guys with funny beards tried to impose on us, especially when they had no foundation to begin with. (This same kind of Latin = English is the reason for the “don’t end your sentences with a preposition” myth too.)
It’s an historic occasion: Use “an” when a word starts with a vowel sound, like “an NBA referee.” Bottom line: does “historic” start with a vowel sound? No. So stop saying “an historic.” The reason some people do it is because the British do it. Why do the British do it? Because in some regions of the country, and with a Cockney accent, they sometimes drop the H sound from words like her, he, or his. (And yet they stick it on words like herbal. Go figure) A dropped H means a word starts with a vowel sound, and hence the “an” in front of it. So people who want to sound like they’re educated in England will do the whole “an historic” thing.
Alright isn’t all right: Turns out it is, much to my relief. I have been using “alright” for years, and was told recently it was wrong. It was a dark day.
Don’t start sentences with And, But, or Or: That might have been true once, but not anymore. It’s a modern invention of writing and language, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Patricia O’Connor says we’ve been starting sentences with And and other conjunctions since the 10th century. She says that other than a bunch of high school English teachers driving themselves to hysterics, there’s no proof we can’t do this.
About the Author: Erik Deckers Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
I love language, and I’m a stickler for grammar and punctuation. I don’t always know the names of the rules, or how to diagram a sentence, but I know what’s right, and what’s not.
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