Language and Language

     You know how someone might say while recommending a book or a movie or something, "This is really good, you ought to read it sometime. There is some language in it, but it's still really worth reading." (Non-book example, but Back To The Future works well here.) Well, I would hope there's language in it....else there wouldn't be any book, you know? If there wasn't language, made of words and letters and, depending on the style, punctuation or infixes, strung into sentences, we wouldn't be able to communicate very well. If we couldn't communicate, well, that would be unthinkable. So it's really a good thing that the Phoenicians invented writing.

      Through the Tower of Babel, whatever the dominant common language existed in the world disappeared and separate language-speakers migrated towards the same areas, which explains how humans scattered all over the world. Over time, certain languages came to the forefront, like Aramaic, replaced by Greek, which fell in time to Latin. Latin, of course, stayed the dominant language for somewhere over a thousand years, gradually evolving into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. French became the main language and gradually a strain developed into English, which has taken a little bit of everything and mispronounced it to create the crazy mishmash of our native tongue.

     This language can be made into millions of words with specific meanings, that change over time, just due to the nature of the way language works. Some of these words have unpleasant literal meanings, which sort of explains why unimaginative people use them when they can't think of another synonym. Of course, they probably don't think of this; but the ones who first started the practice of insulting people with those terms might have. We call these types of words "(awkward cough) well...language", "swearing", "cursing" or "cussing".

     This isn't exactly the right terminology, exactly, for some of those terms, but they work. Swearing is an oath of some type. Cursing is strongly wishing punishment on someone. And, of course, they both can mean using offensive words. It's a little hard to tell, exactly, why some words/terms are offensive; it's just not something society in general tries to figure out. It's not a good habit, using these types of terms regularly and heedlessly. It shows a lack of imagination and decency. But there are some situations where it seems like it would be all right; like in extreme provocation, or to highlight an inflection or a meaning in a way that wouldn't be possible unless you did so.

     There's a great article on this topic from Focus on the Family's movie-and-pop-culture-review site PluggedIn, they say it a lot better than I can. This is something I've been pondering for a while now, just living in a campus bubble, trying to figure out what it was about that power that words contain that can make life miserable, and that link pretty well covers what I'm thinking. This article offers good Scriptural arguments against using profanity. All words have power, really; and we should use that power wisely, because it's a great responsibility.