Words and their Uses

Earlier in the week I was reading about the misuse of language by tyrannies, a connection which (as the essay said) George Orwell made so clear and obvious that it almost seems that the evil is caused by the words and not the other way around. Then yesterday there was an article by Martin Amis which made it plain that he considers language to be a giveaway of the users' levels of morality. It's an interesting piece, incidentally, on liberals' attitudes to fundamentalism, and while it's not totally coherent, it's worth reading - in The Times (UK).

It set me on a train of thought about words.

The brethren have a vocabulary and phrasebook of their own, which is probably more confusing for outsiders because most of the words are standard English, but with non-standard meanings. One example which has gained currency in the last twenty years is "momentary". A dictionary definition would tell you this means brief or instantaneous. For brethren, it means "constant", in the sense of something continuing consciously from moment to moment and being maintained. That example springs to mind because it has always rankled with me that a useful word can have its meaning altered so abruptly and massively.

The subject is one which has been studied by renowned thinkers for a very long time, but it's worth saying again that it's not socially healthy to appropriate words into a system. I disagree with those who say it's impossible to think something one has no words for, but it is a fact that words and their implied meanings shape the thoughts, and shared meanings help to shore up shared values.

Take the big one: Truth. This is a valuable concept in morality, the idea that something can be verifiable and reliable, and I've often thought how subtle it is; not so much to do with fact as the stated existence of fact, and a provable correlation between the statement and the reality. The mark of a really useful word is that it has a clear meaning that is hard to convey by other means, and that definitely applies to this one. Children pick up the idea by usage, not by definitions.

So how does it affect people if the word is constantly used as part of the phrase "The Truth", meaning the interwoven doctrine and values that the brethren hold? I can't answer fully, but it seems clear to me that it is a classic example of authority imposing thoughts by means of meanings, if that makes sense.

By adding a definite article to an abstract noun, the brethren are appropriating the very idea, and making it (aptly) exclusive to themselves. That automatically casts doubt on everything outside of what it is taken to refer to, just as a habit of thought, once the two are connected in the mind. Truth, and what the brethren believe, become one and the same thing, and anything else is, by definition, false. There are many subtle effects of thinking like that, among which is a lack of trust of anyone outside the circle. It's not healthy, and to me it seems to devalue the real meaning of the word.

There must be an enormous number of other examples, but I don't think going through them would add anything to the point, so I'll digress instead, to mention a word I can remember being coined by a girl among the brethren that has gained considerable currency in the area. It's long been a fascination to me to see an unknown word take life over years.

The word is "goshy". It is a classic example of a word that's useful because it has no direct equivalents. When people encounter it, they tend to take quite a while to understand what it means, because nobody has ever successfully defined it - only context seems to make it clear. However, I'll have a stab. It's an adjective, used of things which are endearingly embarrassing. So you can have goshy behaviour, as when you affectionately cringe at something a loved one does in public, or you can have a goshy situation, when a group of friends become collectively flustered over something that shouldn't have been allowed to happen. I doubt that's enough to explain it, but I'd like to spread the word.