Words and Meaning

I am amazed at how well Aloysha's comments about exclamation marks dovetailed with this weeks quote of the week, and a little worried that he thinks like Alan Moore. However, they both have a very good point--words have power and the ability to offer freedom, but only if we allow them.

Language is not static, influxes of new groups of people add new words to a language while technological innovation and new discoveries or theories in the sciences or social sciences necessitate new words to express them. Great poets and writers also craft words to fit their meaning, enriching the English language. The problem then is not that language changes, but rather the speed at which it is currently changing and the fact that it seems to be contracting rather than expanding.

Modern trends in slang have been to over use adjectives, thus stripping them of their weight and power. Awesome is a prime example--no longer is it reserved for things that do truly inspire awe but is now used to describe everything from new shoes, to a card trick, to not having any homework. Weird, whose root means fate, used to refer to something that seemed out of the ordinary in either a supernatural sense or a fateful sense. Now it is any deviation from the status quo, or worse, anything which makes us slightly uncomfortable. The devaluation of language has been exacerbated by instant messaging and text speak which encourage people to boil down feelings and emotions to acronyms or emoticons. This limits the range of feeling which a person can express--instead of being sad or melancholic or disconsolate or morose or despondent or forlorn or upset, all of which have a slightly different shade of meaning, you are now :(

While this is not a government conspiracy and there is no big brother watching your every move, George Orwell, in the appendix on Newspeak in 1984, best expressed the effect of pairing down language. He says, "the purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. . . . Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them."

Replacing vast swaths of words with a single one or overusing words until they have lost all nuance and retain only the most basic of meaning limits people ability to express themselves. This is turn, limits freedom for, as Orwell pointed out, if you cannot vocalize an idea or a feeling you cannot share it and so it becomes dead. If words are the currency of thought devaluing them is detrimental to all of society.