The real word power

WE all use words. In our speech and writing, words are the raw material we
use. Like air, it’s so basic and banal, we hardly pause to consider their significance.

And yet how important for us to realize some fundamental aspects about words! To fail in this level certainly has dire consequences. It can be like poisoning the very water supply of the whole populace.

Words, by necessity, reveal what’s inside our mind and heart. They ultimately reveal whether we are with God or not, whether we love the truth or not. They reveal our faith or the lack of it.

The problem we have is that words are often used purely for our personal purposes. There’s hardly any effort to let them conform to some objective truth. If there be any such reference, the whole exercise is likely to serve selfish aims.

Many fail to understand that words, though discovered and developed by us, ultimately have their own origin and end, and follow their own laws that we have to acknowledge and respect.

For Christian believers, words flow from the eternal and living Word of God, the original as well as the final word. They get their impulse, purpose, consistency and meaning from there. But how many people realize this? How many exert effort to have their words inspired by God’s Word?

It’s when words come from God’s eternal Word that they convey truth and love, concern for justice, the common good and solidarity. That’s when there would be an abiding sense of compassion for everyone.

That’s when they manifest patience and understanding, and other positive and unifying qualities, in spite of our conflicting views especially in our temporal affairs like business and politics.

What is happening these days is that many people misappropriate words, claiming them as completely their own, subject only to their own designs and the meaning they give.

Because of this sad phenomenon, words are used for lying. They are vulnerable to become tools of pride, conceit and vanity, distorting reality. They begin and end with man alone, forgetting God, and everything that can come only from God.

The anomaly can be so developed, it becomes part of a culture. It can harden itself into such aberrations as sophistry and nominalism.

Sophistry is the clever use of words in an argument, a manipulation actually, lending it credibility, and yet the argument is fallacious and wrong.

Nominalism is a more intriguing aberration. It is when words are just words. With no basis in reality, words are mere names. You can just imagine the amount of harm this attitude can unleash.

With this doctrine, words are like toys, and can be enjoyed if you are smart enough to use them by playing around with people’s weaknesses, biases, whims and fancies.

This is what we are seeing and hearing everyday, mostly in the media and in other public fora, including, sorry to say, the pulpit.

The criteria of the words’ success now depend more on how they sound and move people’s feelings, rather than on whether they have real substance and objective truth.

Words are used to appeal more to emotions than to intelligence, more to the flesh than to the spirit. Words are used to evoke a clever play of images and sensations, more to lull people than to reveal truths.

Words can be inflated and deflated at will. They can be stretched and shrunk to convenience. That’s why we have invented many tricks of rhetoric.

Things can be so bad that we can reach the point where words are given in whim, and also received in whim, thus perfecting the confusion around. Everything becomes a lie even if we say many truthful things.

St. Paul once warned us: “They are ever learning, yet never attaining the knowledge of the truth.” (2 Tim 3,6) This is because their words are not inspired by God, who is Truth, but rather by the devil, the father of lies, spoiling truths by cleverly mixing them with falsehoods.

Thus, the story of the Tower of Babel continues up to now. God’s Word should leaven our words!