I'm a writer. It's somewhere in my genes to agonize over my choice of words and my way of speaking. And I also intuitively understood, the moment I saw it, the title of the Robert Bly book, Eating the Honey of Words. They can, indeed, be delicious.
I am not a joiner. I almost have to coerce myself into signing up with a group, even if it is one I'm interested in. Group-ness carries with it, associations of meaning, judgments, and points of view. So do words.
This all came to my attention lately, as I was filling out some forms where they blithely offer the space to "please tell us about yourself." This kind of opportunity is sure to bring me to my knees, and the silence can be deafening as I stare at the blank page of possibilities. You just know that whatever descriptive choices you make are going to provide a myriad of meanings to whoever reads them.
You may think I make too much of this or that I care too much what others think. That is not the case. I couldn't care less what you think about me and I subscribe fully to the notion that you get to carry around any and all judgments you might have; they have Nothing to do with me. What I do consider is, will the words and descriptions I choose convey MY meaning?
A real good example is, I am a Minister. Now unless you are, too, you wouldn't understand that telling that, at a party for instance, is tantamount to saying loudly, "I'm a Cop." The room suddenly gets very quiet, as each brain present sifts through its cache of experience for exactly what that has to mean about you. And this is not about being a good or bad thing; it's what we do with terms. And you don't have to go very far afield to point out other examples around politics, gender, you name it. So sometime ago I took to looking for a way around that. I decided that saying "I'm a Monk" bypassed a host of closed ended assumptions and prejudice, and threw open the gates of possibility. In other words, people tended to need to think about what the term MIGHT mean, instead of what it already meant to them in the past.
Kids seem to do this naturally. When my teenage son comes into the room and says: "OK Dad, I'm gonna bounce," he doesn't mean he's about to ride a pogo stick or hit the trampoline. He means he's going to leave. But the constant use of new meaning for familiar words, just seems to enforce keeping an open mind.
Whether it is the result of the Internet or the accelerated rate of passing around information, we see a new toying with language, meaning, syntax, even spelling. Each group, each business, each country, each region tends to have its own Patois, which is a rural or regional variety of a language; speech of a social subgroup; jargon. This can be a good thing. It also means we might want to be a little more conscious which ones we choose from. Will my personal patois encourage your closed thinking, or open it to new possibilities.
Just some wandering thoughts from a wondering Monk.....or should it be,
some wondering thoughts from a wandering Monk?
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