Volume 6, Issue 5, January 1997

WORDS, THOUGHTS AND DEEDS

Language has been called the most powerful drug known to humanity. The words we hear and speak can have a distorting effect on our points of view. If we do not want others to take over our minds, we should watch words closely. And never mistake their rhetoric for our own ideas ...

We do not inherit words and the tales they tell. Many times as the story of Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp has been told, it must be told again for every child as new generations come upon the stage.

When developing a vocabulary fit to express all our thoughts, hopes and emotions, we need to remember that words are symbols, standing for things. If we did not have words we should be condemned to carrying around large bundles of things instead, like the professors in Gulliver's satire "Laputa."

It is the ability to communicate with words that has made humans the dominant species on this planet. We have learned in science and technology the essentiality of being able to convey information fully and exactly to one another. We are only beginning to perceive the vital importance of communicating socially and politically.

As well the importance of the spoken word is often overlooked. People take their ability to say what they mean for granted. Making ones point is not as easy as it seems. Most of our exchanges of information and ideas in everyday life are oral, whether face to face, in meetings, over the telephone or by computer networks. In our rapidly advancing technologies the spoken or written word is still the most neglected aspect of communications. "The difference between the almost right and the right word is really a very big matter - 'tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning," as Mark Twain put it.

Words are symbols for thoughts, so that when language is distorted, it distorts reason and reality. Sloppy language may lead to the habit of sloppy thinking. If the words that form our thoughts are imprecise, then those thoughts are liable to be imprecise, too. An effective vocabulary has no room for meaningless words. But language, when it works, is the tool that makes it possible to invoke reality.

Yet no matter how extensive our knowledge of words, we should be aware that we can never exercise complete control over them. Words are active, changing, slippery things that do not lend themselves to machine-like precision. For example, the word "fellowship" so frequently used by social groups and religions as a possession of great value has come to mean what anyone wants it to mean.

The first rule of semantics is that words are nothing but the symbols of things and ideas. Language is to reality what a map is to territory. As individuals we must be most careful to understand and protect our own minds.

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.