Words, texts and their mattering….

I like words. Sometimes it’s just the sound of individual words that I’m drawn to (like ‘flibbertigibbet’). You may well have your own favourites. But more often it’s words strung into sentences, usually with the aim of communicating something. Hence I’m sitting here typing. And, presumably, that’s why you’re sitting where you are, reading. You like words too. Mind you, spoken words and written words are not identical (I don’t know what ‘flibbertigibbet’ sounds like inside your head). But they do serve the same sort of purposes, the main one being to communicate meaning. But meaning is a word, and slippery one too. Linguists, philosophers, theologians and scientists have all tacked the issue of what meaning “is”, and have not always arrived at compatible definitions. Some have therefore concluded that there is no such thing as meaning. But that would seem to subvert the whole business of communicating with one another, something humans have actually been doing for a very long time, and with a fairly high degree of success (an observation I’ve commented on before). And it is a view that is, basically, self-refuting.

But what this does highlight is that in using words, whether as a sender or receiver, thought and care are often required. When precision is needed, we can usually achieve it. It does complicate matters and tends to slow communication down. And sometimes we can all get a bit impatient with this. But there is something here that is familiar from many areas of life and behaviour - a speed accuracy trade-off. So when I’m speaking quickly, without much thought, the precision I am communicating with is reduced. A similar thing happens when I sit down at a keyboard and with little thought I just begin to type. Stringing words together isn’t particularly difficult. But stringing them together coherently is a different matter. And of course prior to the words are the concepts that the words are supposed to convey. If I haven’t given these much thought, then prior to the lack of clarity in the words, will be a lack of clarity in the thoughts. The net effect will be ambiguity and uncertainty. This is sometimes a thoughtful intention, but that is probably the exception rather than the rule, and carries its own meaning.

On the other side of the communication process, the same sort of considerations must apply. A whole series of processes are going on in your head right now. Some of them are fairly low-level and not under your control (at least to any great extent) – things like resolving the words on the screen you’re looking at so they are clear enough to read, or extracting meaning from individual words. But at a higher level, implicitly or explicitly, you will have to decide how much work you’re going to put into understanding what I’ve written. If you’re not particularly interested, you will probably merely skim the text, perhaps alighting on the odd word here or there, following the narrative or the argument (such as it is) at a superficial level. If I were to write something obviously crazy at this point (like “raspberry”) you might notice. But then again you might not (in which case the entire point of what I’ve just written will be lost on you!). But if I’ve succeeded in catching your attention, and you’re interested in the meaning of meaning, or the meaning of words, or the business of communication, you’ll be working to understand both what is written and what is meant. That will take time on your part, time that you could have spent doing something else. That implies a price that you either will, or will not be prepared to pay.

To be sure, there are lots of reasons why you might not want to pay a particularly high price to extract the meaning from this particular text. It is after all, merely a blog post, one of many on this blog (this is #152), and there are of course many blogs (plus books, magazines etc). But we all have an innate idea that some texts are much more important than others. And with these we have a sense that it will pay to do the work. And there are those texts which claim (or are claimed) to be potentially life changing (not something I’d claim for my blog I hasten to add). If you are persuaded that this is the case, the words (and the sentences and paragraphs they make up) will matter a lot and you’ll want to do the work to get at the meaning. While such claims may be spurious, Benjamin Franklin (among others), he of “Give me 26 lead soldiers and I will conquer the world” certainly thought that words could matter.

Part of the human condition is that our time and resources are finite, so choices have to made. Given the slipperiness of words, the question arises as to how best to spend our finite resources. Because we know that some words matter more than others we direct variable degrees of attention towards the text of adverts, comic strips, headlines in tabloid newspapers and captions on TikTok compared to those in a textbook we need to study to pass an exam or a philosophy book making an argument that we really want to get to the bottom of. Experience, our own and that of others, can also be a guide. Where we know that others have claimed to find particular words truly transformative (sometimes transformations we ourselves may have witnessed), these will be the ones we really want to pay attention to and work at to understand.

There is a particular text in mind (of course). It is one of the most critically scrutinised in history. It has been pilloried and banned in some jurisdictions. It has been lauded and literally worshipped in others. This wide range of responses and attitudes itself is evidence (of a sort) that here is something worth exposing oneself to, reading, reflecting on and responding to. Given the range of reactions to it, and conflicting claims about it, it is clearly likely to have its complexities. This can’t all be down to the vagaries of the readers and hearers of it. So it is likely that work will indeed be required. But at least there is a prima facie case that here indeed are words that should be encountered first hand, as opposed to depending on second-hand, necessarily filtered accounts of it. And there does appear to be a coherent core meaning that both historically and now millions have extracted from it (as well as some crazy conclusions and consequently crazy behaviour).

If the Bible is what it and many of its previous readers have claimed, then here are words that matter. And perhaps they matter more than anything else.