Language is a magnificent gift, made known best in reflective thought and a special aid for problem solving during life’s sojourn. It provides a refined way of expression for the mind and emotions – when used rightly. By it we give, withhold, condemn, tempt, think, encourage – verbally. By it we resolve serious issues of life, and by it we often complicate them. It becomes a mixed blessing of our own making. One of the reasons we get on so well with the pets in our lives is that they can’t speak to us. We permit them wide ranging because they are dumb, which is to say they can’t speak. Dumb, in its primary meaning, simply means that the living thing can’t form words. That inability does not mean the animal can’t learn, or is incapable of actions that communicate. The animal is unable to speak thoughts to us, except in sounds and gestures. Animal life does not use diction – they haven’t the physical machinery (organs) for it.
All languages begin with speech – that is with sounds given meaning emanating from the minds and throats of persons. It is interesting that some of the most influential persons to have ever lived left no recorded (written) messages of their own hand. The words they spoke have been given to us from those who heard them speak. Socrates comes to us entirely from his students, especially Plato. Plato so respected Socrates that he may have dressed up some of Socrates’ statements so furthering Socrates’ reputation, perhaps to advance an idea of his own by attributing it to the master philosopher. We have nothing Jesus wrote, and we have only the information that he wrote in the sand, or we would not know that he wrote anything at all. He seems to have been doodling. We owe language to speech and speech to language. There is a library of titles about language – evidence of its importance. John McWhorter wrote an excellent book, What Language Is, (and What it isn’t and What it Could Be) – in which he addressed many of the issues we would touch on here if space afforded. Much of what has been learned about language in modern times has come from missionary movements, concerned with translating Scripture in native tongues. They discovered numerous factors about life that denigrate or advance this or that social grouping for the reason of richness or poverty in their language. They have discovered, for example, that there are some important concepts for understanding natural life and sacred meanings that had no words in the studied language. Words were created from local experience to make up the loss or creation/revelation of an idea.
We learn in the evaluations of oral rhetoric (persuading/storytelling/teaching) that it is forceful and respectable when it is truthful, well formed, interesting, relevant, adapted to listeners, and most powerful when appealing for belief and action. It is in this context that Jesus instructed the disciples to preach (sacred rhetoric). The Apostle Paul made clear that persons will not believe unless they have a preacher. We can assume that he is preaching (persuading) even in his writing. The writing was a way to conserve and pass on preaching, the oral tradition. This can be done in writing so to underline and conserve the preaching. It applies to all of life. The wife reading the letter of her husband, on a military assignment in a distant land, virtually hears his voice in what he has stated on the page. He follows the pattern from her letters. We do the same when we read the letters of Scripture. This is God speaking to us through his secretaries. The truly devout seize upon that awareness. Their obedience to the guidelines addresses mind and practice. Those knowing the factors of oral rhetoric that include the quality of the voice, the pitches, the speed of delivery, the projection of voice composition, the vocabulary, and the ethos of the speaker are far more likely to be persuasive for anything, even the gospel of Jesus Christ, than for those with slovenly slang, crude, childish speech, or lesser quality of expression. In my view it is short-sighted for the modern writer of television and film projects to violate the mystery of human idealism and uplifting to beauty to follow the pattern that uses swearing, and crude word pictures to capture reality. I am grateful that my formal education, aided and abetted by my mother, included, for years, instruction in how to use language, spoken and written. It became vital both for my life’s career and clarity, and opened doors for meaning and blessing to others. We have been lifted and cast down by words. The lifting greatly exceeded the disparaging words, sentences, stories, lessons, to the affirmatives of life. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020