#SOL24-29 Soft Words

It is Tuesday and time to write a 'Slice of Life." 
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If we took violence out of our everyday language, would we notice more clearly the violence in the world? Does our language itself numb us to real pain and tragedy in the world, becoming almost a blanket or a throw that we hide beneath, normalizing the horrors around us?

These aren’t really my thoughts, but a paraphrasing or extension of the poet Ocean Vuong’s. He speaks about the preponderance of weaponized words in our ordinary vocabulary (Krista Tippett, On Being, “A Life Worth of Our Breath” April 30, 2020/updated May 3, 2023) and his message lingers in my head. I repeated some of his thoughts to a friend, reading from the transcript:

I think we’re still very primitive in the way we use language and speak, particularly in how we celebrate ourselves — “You’re killing it.”

But one has to wonder, what is it about a culture that can only value itself through the lexicon of death? I grew up in New England, and I heard boys talk about pleasure as conquest. “I bagged her. She’s in the bag. I owned it. I owned that place. I knocked it out of the park. I went in there, guns blazing. Go knock ‘em dead. Drop dead gorgeous. Slay — I slayed them. I slew them.” What happens to our imagination, when we can only celebrate ourselves through our very vanishing?

Ocean Vuong,
On Being with Krista Tippett,
April 30, 2020/updated May 3, 2023

I said to my friend, I wonder how often we do this? How often are we using violent metaphors and phrasing?

She shot me down, I mean, she denied the possibility, saying “I never do that; maybe you do it, because you come from a military family.” 

Well, I didn’t argue with her, but I think we all use these expressions. I think Ocean Vuong is right about our language being steeped with such references. I told my friend that I really want to work on this in my own language, to pay more close attention to my verbal minefield   – I mean, the vocabulary I speak, to watch my words and notice where I slip. I started a log of ‘violent’ words that I use and hear, times when I invoke ‘death’ or cruel or brutal terms when I am actually conveying something much lighter. 

I took a shot at it. I wondered. I guessed. 

In my word journal, I write and practice ‘rewrites,’ writing the message anew by using words that offer softness, love, and kindness. 

Honestly, I am surprised by how ubiquitous this ‘verbal tic’ is for me – and how heightened my awareness when these terms are used by others. Here are a couple entries from my log:

1. I have a love ritual at bedtime with my grandchildren, where I dump a bin of their stuffed animals on top of them after I tuck them in…yes, it’s rather silly, but it is great fun for the littles. I realized I was saying “I’m going to bombard you!” – and my immediate substitution was “I’m going to get you!” (which sounded rather ‘attacking,’ I think). After some thought, I changed the words of the game to, “Here comes a rainstorm, oh my, such rain, today!”  This offers them a gentler image before sleep.
2. Try to name what I love about the person rather than ‘dismissing’ their uniqueness with a canned line. “You are killing me!” becomes, perhaps, “You are so quick-witted!” 
3. Bullet journal? Bullet lists? My goodness, everyone says this. How about “dot journal/lists”? Or an ‘itemized’ journal/list? This one has me flummoxed; what to substitute for bullet?
4. What about the word trigger; why do I use this? Might it be substituted with “awaken” or “set off”? Scares me? Makes me uncomfortable? (To illustrate how often this term is used unnecessarily, I happened upon a prayer that read – I kid you not – ‘trigger my care, Lord” – and thought, why couldn’t this be written ‘awaken my care’?) 
5. shoot from the hip; say instead, “just a wild guess here” or “I’m being a bit impulsive, but I wonder…”

There are many more entries; my list keeps growing longer and longer. Maybe there isn’t a one-to-one replacement for every one of these terms.  Maybe more than one word is needed. Maybe the whole context needs to be rewritten. Maybe it makes sense to use the terms at certain times. I do think this is worth thinking about and that these basic twists to my language are a positive step for me.

“We often tell our students, The future’s in your hands. But I think the future is actually in your mouth.”

-Ocean Vuong

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