Language and Truth
“How are you?”
“I’m good!”
“How good?”
“What do you mean?”
On June 3, 2018 I was in the comfort of my home embracing habitual late sleeping in attempt to recover from late nights studying for finals and my first year at MIT. Finals season, in addition to enhancing the bags underneath my eyes, had significantly decreased the amount of time I had to socialize and watch TV. So, when I wasn’t sleeping I was either watching Netflix and/or FaceTiming with friends I hadn’t spoken to in a while. One of these friends I called on this day. The dialogue above was how our exchange started, me seeking to learn more about her being “good” and her response to my last question began with a slight chuckle and followed with: “What do you mean?”
As precise as she is with her language, I was slightly shocked that her response to my question was another question. What do you mean what do I mean? I thought.
However, in the time of processing her question I saw precisely how her brain was processing my inquiry. She was doing the work of making sure the words she had yet to state answered my question completely by giving me an opportunity to further explain what information I was seeking. Its a common response to say “good” to someone checking in on your state, but my question was an attempt to understand if her answer was a default response. Although in this innocent exchange the weight on my words weren’t particularly paramount, my mind philosophically wandered to the point of asking myself: What are the ways in which we as people use words out of habit? How is this habit detrimental to communication — negatively impacting our psychological, physiological, and spiritual fitness?
After much thought, I did not arrive at an answer — though that was never my intention. We have been inundated with the misconception that questions have answers and those answers end in periods or exclamation points, can be separated by commas and em-dashes. However, the truth of questions is that their answers can end in question marks. This is not an attempt to naively answer the complexity presented by the above question, but thoughts on why this question is worth the energy to answer:
Language is important.
The words that we use and the phrases we have embraced as our own lexicon must be problematized, if only to remind us that we must continually renew our minds. Somewhere on the journey between the non-verbal feeling becoming the verbal expression our newborn thoughts and emotions have lost their luster and undergone a vexatious transformation that can only attempt to resemble its original form.
As a people, we have forgotten this truth. That words are simply a form of energy transfer from one vessel to another. That they have impact in their subtleties. From me to you and from you to me.
In her 1993 Nobel Lecture in Literature, Toni Morrison states this about language:
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined, and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although it is poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie…We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
Morrison is pushing the academy and all those who would read these words to consider the definite impact of language on human life. In language, we find and can extract the writer or speaker’s intentions, motives, purpose, measure. How you speak, what you say, and who you say it toward are indications of your heart.
Complexity builds as we consider language cross-culturally. In an article titled “Words Matter: The Importance of Language in US-Africa Relations”, Kellen Love — a rising Junior at Dartmouth College — opens by stating:
“When communicating complex ideas, words matter. In international affairs, you have to be as precise as possible and navigate cultural nuances, to ensure that nobody gets the wrong impression. This is particularly true in global discussions about Africa, where a history of exploitation has created a present state of disconnect, continents separated by more than just bodies of water.”
When we put language to practice we construct policy, garner support, create conflict, craft narrative, build lie or truth. It was language that concocted false understandings of Africa and its culture in the world, and it will only be by intentional truthful language that this is undone.
I think back to my friend asking me “What do you mean?” and am grateful. It is a question that we must never grow tired of both asking and hearing, for it is by this perpetual thought that we can better approximate an understanding of our own state, the state of others, and impact the world and people around us with truth.
