Words.
We use them every day without giving them much thought.
We write them in letters. We tap them into emails. We send them across the world in seconds on a telephone. We use words to tell somebody we love them. We use them to say we are sorry. We use them to explain, persuade, comfort, warn, remember and sometimes simply to have a bloody good laugh.
Words matter.
We wrote about that recently when we looked at the old-fashioned letter and what we lost when we exchanged carefully chosen sentences for hurried messages and little blue ticks.
But there is another side to words that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Words can be turned into knives. Not because the words themselves are sharp. Because somebody decides to sharpen them.
Take the word primitive.....
It is a remarkably old word, derived from the Latin primitivus, meaning first of its kind, original or belonging to an early stage.
For centuries it was an ordinary word.
We speak of primitive Christianity.
Primitive art.
Primitive tools.
Primitive technology.
Primitive societies.
And nobody needed to call the language police.
The word itself simply described something considered early, simple or undeveloped.
Indeed, there are circumstances in which primitive might almost be a compliment. Something primitive can be original. Untouched. Uncomplicated. Closer to its beginnings.
So when did this ordinary little word become dangerous?
Not, I suspect, when the word changed.
It didn't.
We changed the way we hear it.
And that is where things get rather interesting.
Because somewhere along the way we began to confuse what a word means with what we have decided the person using it must mean.
Someone says primitive.
Somebody else hears inferior.
The speaker may have meant simple, early or technologically undeveloped.
The listener supplies backward, stupid or lesser.
And then comes the leap:
I heard racism, therefore racism was spoken.
From there it is only a short step to:
Because racism was spoken, the word itself is racist.
And now we have come full circle.
The word has acquired a meaning it did not necessarily possess when it left the speaker's mouth.
That should concern us.
Not merely because of primitive.
Because it can happen to almost any word.
Words can be taken out of their context, stripped of their ordinary meaning and presented to an audience already primed to be offended by them.
A perfectly ordinary word can then be made to do extraordinary political work.
It can ruin a reputation.
End an argument.
Silence a discussion.
Turn a disagreement into a moral accusation.
And once the accusation has been made, the original sentence can become almost irrelevant.
We no longer ask:
What did the person actually say?
We ask:
What did I hear?
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel captured the problem rather beautifully more than half a century ago when they wrote about people talking without speaking and hearing without listening.
Perhaps that was more prophetic than we thought.
Because listening is not simply hearing sounds.
Listening requires us to make an effort to understand what another person is actually saying.
It requires context.
It requires patience.
And occasionally it requires us to consider the uncomfortable possibility that we may have heard something that wasn't actually said.
That doesn't mean words cannot be deliberately offensive.
Of course they can.
It doesn't mean racism doesn't exist.
Of course it does.
And it certainly doesn't mean that people should be free to disguise contempt behind a dictionary definition.
But neither should we turn every word into evidence of an unpleasant intention.
Otherwise language becomes a minefield.
And when language becomes a minefield, people become frightened to speak.
That is not a healthy society.
Words are among the oldest tools human beings possess.
We have used them to build civilisations, preserve histories, pass knowledge from one generation to the next and tell our children who they are.
We have used them to declare wars and end them.
We have used them to make promises that lasted a lifetime.
We have used them to say I love you.
We should be very careful before allowing those same words to become political weapons.
Because once we begin judging words not by what they mean, but by what somebody claims to have heard, there may be no word left that cannot be turned into a knife.
