Last week author Adam Gopnik spoke on campus about what makes language powerful. We don’t often consider how our mode of expression can influence the mind and heart of a listener, but we should.
President Barack Obama’s rise from obscurity to the highest office in the land, Gopnik pointed out, can be attributed to his ability to move a crowd with a speech.
I’ll try to use the three linguistic tactics Gopnik said Lincoln and Darwin used to make their arguments compelling. I’ll argue, half facetiously, that turns of phrase and euphemisms have created a gulf between the true meaning of words and how we use them, and that we ought to rename everything with non-word codes of letters and numbers — the U might become C84U2J — because words should be reserved for description.
Lincoln’s and Darwin’s first tactic was to illustrate their points with a micro-example before launching into generalizations. Here goes: Last week my friend dismissed the Disney actress Selena Gomez as “a flash in the pan,” implying that her celebrity status will be short-lived. I imagined some scallops getting a quick sear in a hot frying pan.
The phrase “a flash in the pan” actually comes from the days of flintlock firearms. A smaller explosion in the “priming pan” ignited the main charge of these guns. When the mini-explosion failed to set off the actual shot, the effect was just a “flash in the [priming] pan,” implying an ineffectual and short-lived force.
My friend is a passionate proponent of anti-gun legislation and would surely be dismayed by her use of a gun metaphor.
Another micro-example: Mira Nair, the Indian filmmaker who will speak in Kingsbury Hall on March 27, says she’s tried hard not to be a “third-world apologist.” She probably doesn’t know that the phrase “third-world” was originally coined as a badge of honor by her native country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. He used it to describe countries that maintained their independence and resisted the influence of the United States or the Soviet Union. In this sense, any “third-world” perspective would in fact align well with Nair’s desire to be an independent voice for truth in the film world.
Unawareness of the meaning of words we use causes moral misdirection and threatens the integrity of our common commitment to truth.
Linguistic tactic number two: Abe and Charles discussed all possible counter arguments and explained why their theory withstood criticism.
Some might argue that reducing euphemistic names to number-letter codes would over-simplify their meaning. It is true that non-word names wouldn’t offer information about the nature of the item in question but would actually limit the misconceptions people form based on a name. If the pro-life lobby were renamed 00Y82M, opponents to this position would not be assumed to be, by definition, pro-death.
Another objection to non-word names is that they would be hard to remember. This is a valid concern. But the mind is a muscle that must be exercised. Within a generation, the memory capacity that used to be taken up memorizing the phone numbers now conveniently saved in “contact” lists can easily be re-devoted to remembering six-digit names.
Third, Lincoln and Darwin avoided sensational speech, making their points in the simplest terms possible. Ahem.
When highly emotional words are used in names they change how we understand both the named thing and the word. “Liberty” is just such a significant word. Liberty City is the name of one of the poorest and most violent neighborhoods in Miami.
Children in the Liberty City school district surely have a distorted idea of America’s promise of liberty. Naming both the rich and poor neighborhoods of Miami with variations on 44EVQ2 would at least equalize how citizens refer to where they live. It would also protect powerful words such as liberty from losing their value.
Editor’s note: Mimi Marstaller takes on linguistic techniques used by Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin for the sake of her argument.