Roy Jacobsen, over at Writing, Clear and Simple, posts an interesting short video on “The Power Of Words.” (Click on the link to see it; I’ll throw him the traffic rather than embed it here.)
“The power of words” is a subject that intrigues me; I don’t have a fully developed philosophy of it. As a writer I know from experience that finding the right words makes a huge difference. I feel (though I wouldn’t be dogmatic on it) that there’s a mystical power in some words. As I understand it, in Old Testament Hebrew there’s no essential difference between a thing and its name. To name a thing gave you a certain power over it (thus Adam’s naming of the beasts made him lord over them all). God’s essential name, Y*H*W*H, is never to be spoken, in part because He cannot be mastered.
This sounds terribly primitive and superstitious to the modern mind, but is there not some echo of it in the Social Busybodies’ incessant campaign to change the names of things? We just get used to one “appropriate” word for people of African descent, or indigenous American tribes, or people with mental or physical problems, and the busybodies suddenly announce a name change. I assume they do this because the magic they hoped to conjure up through their magic words has failed to materialize. So they need to try a new incantation.
Blogging note: I’ll be out of town again tomorrow (personal, not Viking-related), so no post from me.
>As I understand it, in Old Testament Hebrew there’s no essential difference between a thing and its name.
Yes, and the word for “thing” is “dabar” which is also the word for “word.” There is a story in the Talmud about a Babylonian who saw a Jew walking with his son. The Babylonian cast a curse at them. The Jewish father threw himself bodily over the boy so that the words would not hit him.
As a proponent of some forms of the “incessant campaign to change the name of things,” I think you’re absolutely right–but the process is older than you might think. The word “cretin” originally was “Christian,” and referred to stupid people–in an attempt to train those who refer to them to think of them as humans, rather than subhuman creatures.
The problem is that there are certain types of people that we as sinful humanity don’t want to think of as human–very stupid people, handicapped people, &c. So whatever name we apply to them will quickly shift its meaning, and loose any quasi-magic ability to make people think better of them.
One could argue, however, that something is gained in the meantime.
I think all we gain is an infinite list of no-longer-usable words.