WORDS FOLLOW ME: Mere words

On the heels of some childhood name-calling, we’ve all been told, or have ourselves summoned up, the schoolyard ditty: “Sticks or stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” It is a limited comfort because, even as children, we suspect that it isn’t true.

The song would not have been summoned had we not already experienced the hurt; once summoned, it hardly salves what ails us. Experience teaches us that sticks and stones are seldom as devastating as well placed words.

Words also have a strongly positive power, and are in all cultures efficacious for the good. The honour that poets are accorded is dependent on a universal recognition of the uncanny power of words, specifically its intermediary role between the visible world and the invisible.

In many places, the role of the poet is thus merged with that of the priest and the prophet. We even see this in modern literary culture in the eagerness with which notable writers are sought out for interviews and sounded out for their opinions on matters far beyond their actual areas of expertise.

Words illuminate, admonish, trouble, heal. We are inclined to agree with Shakespeare’s dictum that “action is eloquence” but we also instinctively believe that eloquence is itself a form of action, too.

I’m following these thoughts because of the reaction in the United States to the award of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama. It seems to me that reasonable people can disagree on whether or not Obama merited the prize at all, and whether he merited it this early in his career.

That is not the point of this essay. What I want to look at is one accusation in particular, one that he has had to deal with for a long time: that he has done nothing, that he is “mere words,” that speeches are by definition empty and do not constitute real work.

To look at that question, though, I will swerve from the political into the scientific for a moment.

For a long time, scientists believed that we were born with a sort of mental blank slate; as the years of infancy passed, it was thought, both vocabulary and the rules of grammatical structure became imprinted unto the empty brain of the child.

Sometime in the late 1950s, the American theoretical linguist and MIT professor Noam Chomsky made some startling claims that went against this status quo.

Chomsky’s basic point was that linguistic faculty was innate: innate in the sense that the structures that handle syntax and grammar are already encoded in brain genetics. All we need to do as infants is learn specific vocabularies and usages.

One of Chomsky’s main arguments is that the acquisition of language—this subtle, complex, firecely rule-governed thing—is so easy that most four-year-olds have done it successfully.

The toddlers in Beijing learn Chinese (impossible as that language might seem from our point of view), the ones in Nairobi learn Swahili, the ones in Rio learn Brazilian Portuguese. But how?

The scaffolding is already there in the brain for all possible language skills. The infant brain activates the necessary parts, builds the walls, so to speak, depending on what language the child has been exposed to.

Chomsky believes that a genetic mutation in the human brain delivered this language-processing advantage to us; so powerful an advantage was it that it spread to the entire species.

More recent scientific studies suggest, instead of a sudden mutation, a slower evolution of language skills. These scientists see language as connected to the evolution of the brain itself and to the development of communication.

In other words, language is embedded into the way we think: we don’t think and translate those thoughts into words: we think by means of words. The main proponents of this theory, a pair of linguists called Sapir and Whorf, suggest that a community’s thoughts are literally limited by its language: what people do not have the words for, they cannot think about.

If Sapir and Whorf are correct, it means that language is the very substance of our thought processes. The philosopher Daniel Dennet explains this idea by saying that we cannot really describe thought without describing language, nor vice versa.

Small wonder, then, that words move us, hurt or heal us, and make all the difference in the world.

And so, the accusation, cast again and again at Barack Obama during his campaign for the presidency and afterwards, that he was all talk and no action, betrays a certain prejudice against thought itself.

I remember a powerful speech Obama gave in March 2008 in Philadelphia, when he was still a candidate. It was called “A More Perfect Union,” and it presented, to the widest American audience possible, thoughts and words that helped clarify (or at least make less muddy), in the minds of many, the realms of racial discourse.

In that one speech, he did more to move forward America’s racial argument with itself that any other person who had been seen in the American public sphere in decades.

Since his election, in addition to the arduous “real” work of passing bills, giving executive orders, determining military strategy, and fighting Republican lies, Obama has also given speeches that won him hearers in the Arab world, he has spoken out (from the most powerful office in the world) about a nuclear non-proliferation ideal that requires the U.S. to participate in ridding the world of these disquieting weapons, and he has on several occasions addressed America’s young people directly to urge them to prepare well for their futures.

Like Churchill and Cicero, like Faulkner and Martin Luther King, like Mirabai and Achebe, Obama is a man of words. Do his words matter?

The political partisanship at work in much of the opposition to him can be neatly encapsulated by the idea that he is considered a mere talker, but that the conservative model Ronald Reagan, no Cicero he, was called “the great communicator.”

Recall Hamlet’s response when Polonius goads him about what he’s reading. The sulky prince fires back, “words, words, words.”

The words are of no account to Polonius, for he lacks imagination. But words, as far as Hamlet is concerned, are indeed coextensive with action. His ability to describe his complex inner states in language, in fact, eventually proved only too fatally active for Polonius.

“Of all the talents bestowed upon men,” Churchill once wrote, “none is so precious as the gift of oratory.” Mere words indeed, but they do have a way of making the difference.