The Care and Keeping of Words: Part 1 of 5

Definition: A Humpty Dumpty Problem

This is the first of a series on the use of words. I hope it will be generous and apply to anyone who uses words, for any reason. I will here tackle definitions, because if they don’t come first, everything that follows is futile. Next, I’ll discuss the manipulative potential of analogous reasoning and later, of bad questions. I will end by looking at a couple of specific words to clarify their oft-conflated uses. This paragraph breaks my rule about avoiding stilted methodologies outside of the empirical sciences and studies (I write about that here and stand by my general opposition on artistic grounds) so please forgive me this paragraph!

Definitions lay the foundation for all real discussion. This has never been more important than in an age where otherwise rational people are comfortable labeling baseless opinion as “personal truth.” In such a quagmire, you can easily have a full-fledged battle while unwittingly talking about totally different things. Sometimes you can avoid the mud simply by defining terms. Disagreement and irrationality will still exist, but at least we will know what we’re dealing with.

By definition, I don’t mean that desiccated convention of valedictory speeches: “My fellow graduates! What is success? Merriam-Webster defines success as…”

While I hope we can all agree to pasture this tired opener forever, it is standard practice in social sciences to define terms for the purposes of your paper or study. You still see idiotic reader responses and, less innocently, intentional political twisting, that ignore these clarifiers. If we were all more careful (and honest enough to call out our allies for such irresponsibility) we could avoid a lot of acrimony.

Francis Shaeffer writes about the co-opting of language, wherein the words persist, soothing people with their familiarity, while the meanings shift beneath them. He has examined the use of “words that have strong connotations as they are rooted in the memory of the race…These words give an illusion of communication…One hears the word “Jesus,” one acts upon it, but it is never defined. The use of such words is always in the area of the irrational, the non-logical. Being separated from history and the cosmos, they are divorced from possible verification by reason…”

Such confusion is rampant in what we call communication today. We speak past each other, each confidently brandishing words that we assume are mutually understood. Shamefully, we are also often content to land a hit on a straw man. And it comes back to bite us: the same laziness makes us prime victims for the rhetorical tricks of others. Finally, the real sense of having been spun in a circle by someone wittier breeds cynicism and distrust.

But if we first agree on definitions, we have a foundation from which to refine our thinking. For instance, if we disagree that plants, animals and humans are each categorically and substantively different, we can still, by understanding the definitions being offered, measure our positions on issues like animal testing or whether the dog should sleep in the bed, for internal consistency. If we can’t always retreat to any common ground, we can at least start with common understanding and from it, trace our logic from root to conclusion. In other words, we can disagree, but we still have to make sense.

If we disagree on definitions, a clear point of divergence can preserve our shared humanity. If I were to say that Chicken Pot Pie was an abomination, someone might say that I was mad (and if mad, then pitiable), or that I was obstinate (and if obstinate, then contemptible), or that I was insensate (and if insensate, then less than human). These would be radical extrapolations, but we do make them all the time, implicitly.

But what if I were then to reveal that my idea of Chicken Pot Pie was that thing the Pennsylvania Dutch make that is really a soup with blobs of dough floating about in it? You might laugh and explain that you referred to a creamy, double-crusted sensation using the same term. And if I were to further clarify that by “abomination,” I meant a linguistic mess, not a culinary one, then we could have a different conversation. Why call a soup a pie, you might ask? Why say “pot” if it’s baked in a pan, I could counter?

And if we were then to research its origins and find that the Greeks preferred theirs with robin meat?

Well, after all that, we could still have our preferences, but at least we would understand precisely what we were rejecting. 

We might even find common ground. The dumplings are made from a crust-like dough. We might allow that, grudgingly. We might all relinquish our claim to be “the original” now that we know about the robins. And we could also agree that robin meat is so passé. 

Of course it’s usually more complicated than pot pie and sometimes the disconnect is actually in bad analogous reasoning, which is a subject for another day. But when we start by defining terms, and realize our disagreements are fundamental, we can avoid polarizing reactions (wrong=stupid=subhuman-conspirator). It is much easier to vilify and dehumanize over opinions held further down the line, so to speak. At the very least, we can calmly agree that we are often speaking different languages.

We should ask logical consistency of everyone, but if we acknowledge different starting points, than we can reasonably expect incompatible conclusions, and recognize an honest human process that yields them.

Truth is one, and most of us are missing it to some degree. Which means that in some cases, opposed positions can each contain some truth and some faulty reasoning. It also means that sometimes false premises invalidate conclusions. But even if I think you have both started and ended wrong, fully understanding someone’s reasoning helps us be kinder because most people aren’t actually plotting the world’s fiery end.

Within Four Walls

I have drawn a black line through April. Days to have been spent in D.C. at meetings, days to have been spent sight-seeing in the Pacific, regular days of worship and classes and workouts, all stretch before me now as blanks. You probably have some black lines and some blanks to reckon with, too. We’ll all be getting to know our own walls a little better in the next few weeks. If being agoraphobic qualifies me to speak on confinement, I have a few encouragements for communing without community.

Enchantment requires time and attention. In anxious days, the soul struggles to settle into story. But if we can shut out the news feeds, we may find an unprecedented opportunity to dust off dormant imaginations. What have you never had time to learn, study, enjoy, reread, marvel at? The tyranny of the urgent is broken. Suddenly the gift of time, in the ugliest of garbs, has been handed to many. We people of the Book often lack the hours to be people of books. Perhaps the days of lockdown offer us precious time to reenchant ourselves with beauty and story and truth.

Story feeds restless minds. The children are restless. We have a captive audience, like it or not. Draw their minds into action while they’re stuck in the house with stories of adventure and sacrifice and heroism, read aloud. Do all the voices if you can. If this isn’t a family habit and you fear a lukewarm reception, start small, but pack a punch. Make some cocoa, light a fire or some candles, and read “The Cremation of Sam McGee” in low, spooky tones. Short and swashbuckling, Call It Courage is good by a window, better in the yard, best in a treehouse.

Story allays our fears and cushions our grief. Story can shrink us down to size. Even a dwindling coffee supply or rationed toilet paper can feel daunting, and uncertainty can overwhelm. Story enters into fear and pain and gives words to sorrow. Heroes, those who really lived, and those imagination brought to life, make us brave. They stand on their own precipices and remind us that we are not alone on ours.      

The greatest story reassures us of victory. All the good stories echo back the first story. Imbibe them all, but more than ever, read the original, the story of God and his people. It ends well. Pray the Psalms alone in your room as David prayed them in the cave of Adullam. Around your own dinner table, sing the hymns that express your current suffering in the hopeful words of the church triumphant.  

Ponder anew, what the Almighty can do.

Story Begets Story

Here are some unrelated facts.

I cure writer’s block by picking up a good book. One of the books currently on my nightstand is about narration. I have two different daughters using two different writing curricula and one mostly just drawing dinosaurs. I am reading a whole stack of books aloud to my kids, and they are reading through a much larger stack of books on their own, and all of them are writing their own secret, magical novels, for fun.

Here’s what I think based on these disparate experiences. If I were going to start over, with a new batch of offspring, I would have several theories.

All times are story time!

1. If you read to them, they will read eventually. I wouldn’t invest a lot of time in a reading curriculum at all, at least until the child showed that they were ready to read. They do this. You’ll be eating breakfast cereal and they will say, “H….hhhh…hhh… does this say honey?” Or you’ll be reading a book to them and they’ll suddenly stop you and ask, “Which word says ‘Mercy Watson?’” And you’ll point it out. And you’ll know they are ready to start learning to read. But if you read to them in your bed in the morning, and on the couch and on a picnic blanket at the park and in the car and in the dentist’s waiting room and in their bed at night, the moment will come.

2. If you keep reading to them, they will become writers. When your child can read Frog and Toad, it’s not time to stop reading aloud. It’s just time to read Charlotte’s Web. And when they can read The Hobbit by themselves, it’s not time to stop reading aloud. It’s just time to read The Count of Monte Cristo. And when they’re over Shel Silverstein (this may never happen, actually) it’s time for Tennyson and Coleridge. You will know from their vocabulary and syntax in normal conversation that the rhythms and imagery of all these brilliant minds have been seeping into them the whole time.

3. A writing curriculum can’t make a writer. Writing curricula CAN help refine the tools they learn from hearing great books read aloud. Whenever I have had good writing teachers, I find that they give names to things I was already doing, or to things I already loved about my favorite authors. The curricula can help you learn why certain things are compelling, and why other things don’t work. But style can’t be learned this way. It can only be articulated. Style is learned by listening and copying and narrating and just loving the best examples of literary style. Bask in beauty and beauty will be the overflow of your heart.

Each of my girls’ writing classes produce stilted, formulaic papers. This is by design, to study form. But an academic approach can’t teach imagery or subtlety or natural pacing. Good art massages the brain into new shapes, and from these shapes spring unique style. Kids who marinate in literature will already use fluently the tools their teachers diagram in class. Through the curriculum, they learn how to recognize them, and how to name them.

The real teachers of style must be Arnold Lobel and E.B. White and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen and E. Nesbitt and C.S. Lewis and the Brontes. The formation of a literary soul is a mystery. But it is a mystery we can probe comfortably, from beneath a blanket, on a couch, over a good story.