I like words. It’s a big part of why I’m a writer. I like everything about them.
Here are some interesting things about words:
(TLDR if you’re too busy to read this: words are complex, multi-faceted, mean different things to different people, have multiple layers of meaning, and have a lot more power behind them than most people realize. It’s good to be mindful of them.)
1. Different groups of people have different ideas about the connotations that each word carries.
2. This doesn’t mean that the meaning of each word is absolutely subjective. Rather, think of each word as a symbol, or an interpretation. People have to broadly agree on the meaning of a word before it can be useful.
3. Here’s where it gets interesting. It is possible for somebody to use an “innocent” word to signal something more sinister. (Examples include “urban”, “thug”, even “female”.)
4. It’s possible for a person to use the word “females” to describe women, and intentionally or unintentionally imply the connotation that the women are akin to livestock or cattle.
5. This isn’t a black-or-white thing. It has plausible deniablity baked into it. Take the word “Indian”. It’s an adjective. It’s harmless, right? It’s an identifier. What kind of anal, hypersensitive person has an overreaction to a word like “indian” or “female”?
6. But it’s never the word itself that people object to. It’s the connotation. Most of us have surely heard some angry person say “that WOMAN” with venom in his voice. And we know when we see it that he’s not using the word as an identifier – he’s using it as a descriptor. He has a list of connotations pinned to that word. When it’s used, you know what it means. It’s not innocent.
But of course, he can claim otherwise. “Are you saying there’s something wrong with being a woman, an Indian, a gay or trans person?” (In practice, they often leave out the ‘person’. But that’s another story.)
7. This is where you begin to see the unequal burdens that different people face. We can all joke about each other’s food and lifestyles and so on, and honestly that shit can be quite fun when it is done with love. Ya’ll know me. I love to have fun, I hate to be a killjoy.
7b. But think about how some people sometimes say “aiyah it’s just harmless fun la” with a deliberate intent of manipulating other people into doing things they don’t want to do. Sometimes it’s not even that conscious or deliberate. Think about a time you might’ve witnessed, perhaps, a friend being pressured into drinking more than they wanted to, staying out later than they wanted to, and so on.
8. Race has been on the radar lately, so that’s what I’ve been talking about. But my interest in this is much broader than that. There’s a large set of words that have a lot of power in our lives. Off the top of my head, these include words like “lazy”, “fault”, “love”.
9. “Lazy” is one of my favorites. It’s an amazingly effective way of blaming a child for her disinterest in something that’s barely her fault. (There’s an entire novel’s worth of “that’s another story” waiting to be written here.)
10. I don’t want to be overly prescriptive about how other people should use their words and live their lives. Telling people what to do or not do is generally ineffective if you don’t have powerful incentives and disincentives to back it up. And it’s kinda crude, anyway. What I’d like to do is invite you to consider the implications and connotations behind the words that you see.
Anyway, words are pretty cool. Our ancestors made them up, then wrote them down, and now by looking at ordered rows of symbols we can hallucinate entire universes and be physically moved by them.
You can crush a person’s spine with them, too.