On Care with Words & with Each Other
I WALKED the dog along the river and up the hill and down again this morning in a sustained light rain. Some people call it “mizzle,: and the word exists, but it sounds like a misspelled missal to me. So I might stick to rain or mist or drizzle. Anyway, in the mist and drizzle, I encountered my Canadian—the one with the corduroys and polite hat whom I wrote about last Sunday, and he said the same thing again, and I suggested to him again that perhaps we were done with slavery now, and then we got talking, and that helped me like him and it helped me get over my intolerance for judgmental small talk, for a moment.
But the pandemic must be impacting my sanity. For I walked home thinking I must write something about why it bothers me, and should bother all of us, when bad language abounds, and how we ought to practise in our own writing and speech the kind of limpidness and honesty of speech we so miss in our leaders and fellow women and men. (Please note that I have deliberately used the “i” word above…)
Time passed. I spent two hours in dictionaries and the wonderful diversions and consolations dictionaries offer—in particular the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, the kind of school every writer should put them selves through daily, and late morning became early afternoon, and the light rain persisted.
I had just finished compiling a two-page list in my journal of all the better ways there are of saying "impact"—the only verb journalists, politicians, health experts, policy wonks, small business owners, athletes, teachers, and all of us, seem to know these days for affect, alter, change, influence, touch, modify, damage, wound, reshape, revive, recharge, destroy, impress, impair, compromise, devastate, traumatise, cripple, hit, transform, delight, defame, diminish, elevate, seduce, decimate, and generally have a sort of terrible effect upon—when a knock at the door (that would be the sound of a courier’s knuckles impacting the wood of apartment 3, I suppose) announced the arrival of a gift. A book. Sent to me by a friend and star mentee, Benoit Trudeau who is, himself, under what care and guidance I can offer him, halfway through writing his own memoir.
What I had just that moment finished writing in black ink pen on smooth and faintly lined white paper were some notes toward an essay on the casual violence such a casually violent word ("to impact" means literally to forcibly make contact with, as in the NRL star's shoulder last night with the other NRL player's eye-socket; or as in a comet with the surface of the earth, which makes an impact crater) and other such lazy usages do to language, to its humanity, to our humanity, and to our minds. What we do to language we do (partly with language) to each other. We are languaging animals, and we thrive, it seems to me, when our language thrives. When language suffers, we suffer, too. When the language we live in transpires in ugliness, life, itself, and all our lives are diminished; when it is trashed, so are our souls. When we favour verbs that leave humanity and specificity out—the way that facilitate and incentivise and impact and outcome do—texture and humanity leak from our everyday worlds and from our selves. Again, we live in language, and when it is diminished, so are we.
When the dog heard the courier’s car pull up, I was writing “the poet is the curate of language, and poetry is the cure of souls.” And there at my door—arriving with a knock that might as well have been a full stop to my list and to my thoughts on the theme of care with words—was a tender gesture from a friend, missing the close contact we have had till COVID shut things down, and here was a book I know he loves, a book that practises care for language—and through careful language, care for all of us. Here is an object, too, that heals because it is not digital, but actual, that is not abstract but concrete. Here is a book that heals also because it is made with love: hardbound, black end-papered, top-and-tail-banded, and set in Garamond (10.75/ 16).
It matters how we speak and how we write and how we care for the things we make and the beings in our lives and for the lives of others less lucky than we are. So thank you, Benoit. Thank you, Ed De Waal and Chatto & Windus. And if you find yourself on the brink, today, of writing or saying "impact," stop. Poetry is what happens when we ask more of language, and poetry shows one how to take that extra care—in our blogs and podcasts and conversations. Care with language, a radical kind of clarity, is how we keep the lyric alive in our lives. So take a moment and find another way. You can steal from my list above or consult a dictionary and steep yourself in language again.
And it looks like I’ve written that essay now. I thought I had more to say. I have a note, as you may see if you look closely at the handwriting on the open journal, that goes:
Casual violence—to sense, to language, to each other.
Impoverishment
Dehumanisation
Cant and politics
Colonisation (of thought by cliche).
I had made a note to mention Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and “The Prevention of Literature” both of which I had taught this last week.
But it seems I have written all that, and most of what I had in mind to say, another, perhaps a better, way. I have been tripped up into writing my assault on impact and the kind of insult such language enacts, by two Canadians, some soft weather, and an act of generosity. Feeling blessed, I should now set about the work I had planned to do.
