“Words Matter,” so get them right!
I’ve dedicated my academic and professional life, along with much of my personal life, to studying, teaching, theorizing, and writing about the endless meanings, implications, and applications of the brief, common, and commonly mis-used expression, “words matter.”
How? Why? To what effect? Making what possible? Causing what limitations? Overcoming what limitations? I never run out of questions. And I come up with some pretty well worked-out answers, too (often with diagrams). It’s what I do, and I love it.
Yep. That’s pretty much the focus of my life. That’s the lens I see through, as I participate and process the world around me. This nerdy “admission” may amuse some people who know me (since obvious) but likely won’t surprise anyone.
Do I ever shut up about it? To some people, seemingly no. But I just think, in response to that view, “If only you know all the things I keep to myself!” As I have taught many times, “sometimes it’s what you don’t say!”
Words definitely matter — a lot — in my world and in yours, too. I encourage you to ever explore the ways in which “words matter.” You will learn a lot about this if you spend some time on this site. I promise you that.
Allow me to briefly (could fill a whole book) explain what I mean by the mantra, Words Matter, as applicable to this website and our present purposes and goals.
How do words matter? They shape and define “humanity”
Many philosophers, rhetoricians and other writers, over the centuries, have written of the link between language and presumed reality. In the terminology of my particular training, I would sharpen “presumed reality” to interpreted reality. We “interpret” activity around us, which we then call “experience” — and most of this happens in our heads, mostly in words! Remember, our theme right now is that words matter.
Along with centering and framing our interpreted reality, words (which only we humans use — I’m not talking about chirps and howls, which communication theorists consider mere “signals,” not words) and language play another role, the one I now see as under attack.
Language constitutes what we might call “the currency” of social interaction. In economic affairs, money drives the boat. In social affairs, it’s language — aka “stuff people say.” In my master’s program at the University of Maryland, I learned (from acclaimed professor, James Klumpp) to recognize the difference between the “stuff” (say money) and the “talk-about” — perhaps a promise of money, which gains cooperation, though the actual cash may never appear. What does? More talk-about! Among us word-using animals, the talk-about often matters more than the stuff we’re talking about. We just love our talk-about. We can talk about it all day!
I hope you appreciate this chain of reasoning, which now leads to the third — and most-presently-pressing — way in which “words matter,” at least to us humans. Language makes up the lion’s share of our (sometimes-prized above all else) culture. Along with other human-made and accepted (or not) aspects of a particular culture, such as food, dress, holidays and other rituals, we use language to define ourselves as humans.
Such a view reveals that we (and studies how we) construct our world mostly out of “linguistic materials” — and these “materials” funnel down to the words we use and what they mean to us.
Ask any “word man”
As you can read in my “About Mike” mini-autobiography, the language theorist I’ve personally studied and used the most in my own theoretical work and teaching (and even named a son for!) is the complex but celebrated “word-man” (his own self-description) Kenneth Burke. In the mid-1900s, Burke profoundly impacted many language-oriented academic disciplines, such as rhetoric, communication, literature, linguistics, philosophy, and others.
From my intense and decades-sustained study of Burke, and many others, I would distill and orient (to this site’s purpose) my explanation of “words matter” to bring to the forefront the function of language in both centering and framing (supposed opposites!) the meaningfulness of our human world.
I don’t disregard such non-verbal paradigms of meaning as the visual (images and art) the performative (music, theatre, and dance) and the technical (math and science) — in naming the core of “lived human experience” — nor will I omit emotions as a core non-verbal component of our “humanity,” but guess what?
Among humans, the “nonverbal” morphs into into the verbal (language)
Music, theatre, and dance consitute languages of their own. We might say that they “are” languages, as is math and as science requires. Computer science hinges on programming languages. And our “blossoming” AI? Well, we know that we interact with it via language and that the AI technology, itself, arises from a notorious “large language model” (presently being sued for copyright infringement).
And those pesky emotions? Well, feelings are certainly different from words — or are they? With very few exceptions of especially visceral “gut feelings” (like immediate reactions of fear or disgust), we process our emotions into words! We think about what we’re feeling, and that think-about often happens in our self-talk — that is, in our self-words! Or maybe we are talking out our feelings to someone else. We might say, “now that I’ve talked about this, I feel much better. Thank you for listening!”
Yes, words matter. Above, I’ve shared just a few ways — ways central to the purpose of this site. And since words matter, let’s get them right — grammatically, stylistically, functionally, and authentically.