I haven’t even had my coffee this morning and already they’re trying to change the English language. I am interested in language. I’m interested in playing with it, and painting with it, and running in it. Sometimes I fantasize about sword-fighting with it. A lot of people might be around if we used words instead of swords. Or guns. But then I think about an Egyptian writer that I heard speak a few years ago, Dr. Nawal El Saadawi. She was put in prison for an article she wrote, and, once there, she asked for a pen [logical: if you’re imprisoned indefinitely, you’ve got a little time to get some work done] and was told—and I’m paraphrasing here, I can’t find the exact quote—that they’d give her a gun before they gave her a pen. That blew my mind. Here is this woman standing right in front of me, telling me about the power of words, receiving death threats for her words, trying to change the world with her words.
That was the moment I started to consider the meaning of my stories; what was I trying to say? It suddenly felt like an awful big responsibility. Like, my dad is a big game hunter in Alaska, and he has all sorts of guns. When I was a kid, I had to go through hunter safety class like six times, because if I didn’t respect those things, they would hurt me. And/or others. My feelings about guns/gun control isn’t so much what I want to go into right now—it’s the parallel that interests me. Like what the Nicolas Cage character said in The Rock (yes, I’m quoting The Rock to punctuate a very serious issue! Yes, to all you haters on Netflix who hated that movie, I’m about to use it to make a valuable point! [I just said “you haters,” ala “Let the haters hate,” which is sooo Kevin Federline of me. Sooo Big Jim]): “The moment you don’t respect this thing—” and he held up a very scary dangerous green nuclear liquid weapon that later burned some guy’s face off— “It will kill you.” And here is this little Egyptian women with white hair, telling me to respect language. To value it—it can create change. It can speak the truth, or give hope, or explain a point of view, or heal, or shake everything up or (insert a multitude of verbs).
This is where I tell you that I feel very, very lucky to live and write in this country—I’m in my kitchen right now, which is nowhere near an Egyptian women’s prison (not like my little stories would ever get me jailed. But who knows? My mother, a fourth grade teacher, can’t read Harry Potter in class ‘cause of the “black magic.” Not like my mother would want to read Harry Potter in class—she’s more into Island of the Blue Dolphins. Where the Red Fern Grows. The Pushcart War. The Great Gilly Hopkins—but it’s the PRINCIPLE of the thing. The “I’ve been teaching fourth grade for [insert high number that I don’t remember] years and they want to tell ME what I can and cannot read to my children?” Not that Rowling is going to jail anytime soon, but, hey, is Rushdie still living in exile for writing The Satanic Verses and getting a fatwa on his head because of it? Respect, people, respect, which brings me back to my feeling very lucky to live and write in this country—BUT, I am concerned about this whole changing the meaning of words business, as in: “Spying” is no longer “Spying.” It’s ‘Surveillance.”
My dad was a big fan of Twain, so there’s lots of Twain quotes percolating around in my head. Such as:
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
To whit:
Spy
v 1. to work, operate, or function as a spy
n 1. somebody who is employed by a government to obtain secret information, particularly regarding military matters about other hostile countries 2. somebody who is employed by a company to obtain secret information about rival organizations 3. somebody who watches other people in secret
Surveillance
n 1. continual observation of a person or group, especially one suspected of doing something illegal
So: if the difference between lightning and a lightning bug is the bug part, it looks to me (and remember, I’m no semantics scholar. Just a lover of language. And digressions. And my freedom of speech, et all) that the difference between “spying” and “surveillance” is the “secret.”
Secret
adj 1. known by only a few people and intentionally withheld from general knowledge
n 1. a piece of information that is known by only a few people and intentionally withheld from general knowledge
For the record, my friend Betsy told me about a game called Dictionary where you make up definitions to words. I like that game! I like playing with the dictionary! I like making up words, and having them mean other things than they’re supposed to and stuff! Whoo-hoo!
That said, lightning is not a bug. And spying and surveillance are not the same thing because one of them is done in secret. And changing the meaning of words is downright scary. It brings to mind a book I’ve been thinking about recently, written by a man whose words I profoundly respect:
(from 1984, George Orwell. Chapter 5)
'How is the Dictionary getting on?' said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.
'Slowly,' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinating.' He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting. 'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. 'We're getting the language into its final shape—the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.' He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy. 'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well—better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course,' he added as an afterthought. ' … Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller … By 2050 earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now.’