My motto: Pro Deo et Patria

For God and Country!

Sunday, February 7, 2010

The Importance of Words

The other day I got a new pocket thesaurus. I happened to glance at the bottom of the cover, and I saw a little slogan. It read: We define your world. I realized what an incredibly profound statement this is, which brings to mind something Americans don't think about very much: their words.

Last year I read the book 1984 by George Orwell. For those who don't know, this book portrays a distopian society in which the tyrannical government controls every aspect of society and life. One of the means by which the government achieved this control was through language. They manipulated language to make people believe their circumstances were being improved. For example, the dictator, Big Brother, told the people he was increasing their chocolate ration from 20 grams down to 10 grams. See the problem here? But the biggest manipulation of language in this society occurred when Big Brother established a new language for the country. This new language was created by deleting words from the people's vocabulary. This included words like freedom, liberty, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, etc. The idea was that in a couple generations, people would no longer know what those words were. They would be wiped out of existence.

This brings me to my point. People think in terms of the words they know. When they no longer have words like freedom or liberty, they lose the capability of understanding those concepts. The importance of the words you know and use is absolutely astonishing! People don't realize the power words hold. It has been shown that civilizations with large vocabularies more often produced freedom than those with small vocabularies. This is why it is important to be articulate, something most people are not in this generation. And I am no exception. I am not nearly as articulate as I would like to be, and my vocabulary is too small for comfort.

One last point: words definitely define your world. The words you use affect other people and the way you look at the world and understand history. For this reason I am extremely persnickety about the words I use. For this reason I do not use the term Civil War because it was far from civil. Instead, I prefer to call it the War Between the States. Likewise, I do not call it the Revolutionary War or the American Revolution because it did not share the characteristics of a great revolution at all. Instead, I call it the American War for Independence. You see, the words you use change your outlook on life and can affect your relationships with people. So you see, the importance of words is incredible, and it is imperative to understand this. Webster's Pocket Thesaurus's catchy little slogan is actually a powerful insight into human nature, an insight we never think about but must be aware of.

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