Reflections on Society and Brainwashing...
I was thinking today about the words that we use to describe ourselves... the labels that make up our quick-and-easy understanding of ourselves, our faiths, our ways, our lives. I am thoroughly appalled by such things. We try to say that we are this or that, but do we really think about what we are calling ourselves? The problem with parents today (well, not to suggest there's only one of them... but...) is that they teach their children what they want their children to be. They don't simply show their children a path to life and help guide them along their own way. Therefore, today, I came to the realization that I have always heard the word "heathen" as a derogatory term, and I grew rather irritated.
In my grandmother's vocabulary, "heathen" was a word best used to describe an unruly child, a little brat that ran around screaming and making a fool of himself, who could not be controlled or contained. I was often berated "sit down and stop acting like a little heathen!". As a student of linguistics, it is something I often find myself doing... stopping and thinking about the meaning of a word as I understand it, and asking myself why I think that word means what I think it means. In many years of doing this, I have come to realize that my parents gave me a very incorrect idea of what many words mean. Their usage of a word as a common adage, or as slang, completely deteriorated my understanding of the word's true meaning. I never understood etymology at all until many years after I had departed my parent's home and come to realize that most other people didn't use many words in the same way as I had been taught to use them. I came to be very familiar with etymology.com as it was a resource which I constantly used to improve my comprehension of REAL language, slowly replacing the backwards, bigoted language choices of my family, my now very disconnected family.
I realize that this is not, however, merely an isolated crime of one "good Christian" family, who were truly unfit for raising children, but rather an epidemic of society, in many ways. The problem comes from first, a lack of understanding of the manner in which language is formed, and secondly, the fact that people seem to consistently forget the manner in which language is learned best: immersion. No matter how many vocabulary drills we do, books we read, or tests we take, we learn language, first, best and most retentively by simply being immersed in conversations. We hear a word. We understand it's meaning via context, and we absorb that word into our psyche as a label for a certain feeling, item, or phenomenon and then we reciprocate that cycle by repeating that word in order to express our own ideals when the situation arrives. Therefore, if the word was used incorrectly when we first encountered it, we are likely to continue the cycle of incorrect speech. But let's look at a deeper level of this issue... What happens when, instead of using a word incorrectly, we apply an esoteric value to a word that already embodies a concrete meaning?
Take the word "heathen" for example. The word literally refers to those who were never converted from the Old Ways into the Christian, Jewish or Muslim religions. Then, since Christians especially disliked those people who refused to convert to their faith, the word was slung around in a derogatory meaning by people who were speaking badly of heathens. They would talk about how horrible those barbaric, uncivilized heathens were. This spiraled on and on for generations. Now, centuries of this sort of talk later... the word carries a negative connotation, and many children, having NEVER heard the word "heathen" used correctly, understand only that a "heathen" is a bad thing. Now... consider what happens when they enter the real world on their own and encounter good heathen folk. Their first instinct is to be wary or dislike this person because they proclaim to be "heathen". Imagine that they wish to befriend this person, or even come to know of, accept, or adopt their ways... They have a mental barrier to break through. They have to undo years of programming enforced by their family, society, and the very language that they speak, in order to move on and grow past the beliefs of a past generation.
This is, to me, inherently very wrong.
Heathen, is, of course, not the only word with which I have noticed this phenomenon. I never even heard the word "pagan" until I first encountered the pagan community. By that time, I had encountered, of course, only Wiccans. Thus, when Wiccans told me that they were "pagan", I came to understand the words to be interchangeable, and did not know at all that there were pagans who were not Wiccans. It was a few years before, even while studying with members of the pagan community, I realized that pagan and Wiccan did not always go hand in hand. I met pagans who claimed to not be Wiccan... then I was confused for some time before I finally got the notion to look the word up and then, only then, did I find out what "pagan" meant. I was horrified, of course, to realize that a pagan was, originally, merely "country folk". The word carried the connotation of a "witch" or practicioner of the old ways, because the country folk were too far removed from the big city concentrations of large populations for the Christian ministries to massively force-convert them, and so they remained witches, heathens, and practioners of old faiths. Thus, pagan came to be equated directly to those who were not Christian, and THEN, with further Christian hatred applied to those not of their faith, pagans became "bad" folks to hang around. If I told my parents I was hanging out with Pagans, I was immediately branded as "going bad" and definitely worshipping the devil.
But am I really surprised? Can any of us be surprised while living in a world where words become taboo, lose all meaning, and remain taboo when no one even remembers what they mean? "Hell" is a curse word, though it refers to the underworld in many religions. "Ass" is a curse word though it refers to an animal. "Damn" is a curse word, though it refers to a condemnation. Yet "dork" is perfectly alright for grade-school children to say, even though it refers to the penis of a whale. Well by my book, that ought be quite alright to say, but no more alright to call someone in meanness than to call them an ass. What is the difference?
If I hate you and express it with known taboo words, is it really any worse than expressing it with clever substitutions for these words? In my heart, the taboo words are preferable. At least then, we're being honest. The intentions, and not the expressions, are what we should guide our children to handle carefully.
In my grandmother's vocabulary, "heathen" was a word best used to describe an unruly child, a little brat that ran around screaming and making a fool of himself, who could not be controlled or contained. I was often berated "sit down and stop acting like a little heathen!". As a student of linguistics, it is something I often find myself doing... stopping and thinking about the meaning of a word as I understand it, and asking myself why I think that word means what I think it means. In many years of doing this, I have come to realize that my parents gave me a very incorrect idea of what many words mean. Their usage of a word as a common adage, or as slang, completely deteriorated my understanding of the word's true meaning. I never understood etymology at all until many years after I had departed my parent's home and come to realize that most other people didn't use many words in the same way as I had been taught to use them. I came to be very familiar with etymology.com as it was a resource which I constantly used to improve my comprehension of REAL language, slowly replacing the backwards, bigoted language choices of my family, my now very disconnected family.
I realize that this is not, however, merely an isolated crime of one "good Christian" family, who were truly unfit for raising children, but rather an epidemic of society, in many ways. The problem comes from first, a lack of understanding of the manner in which language is formed, and secondly, the fact that people seem to consistently forget the manner in which language is learned best: immersion. No matter how many vocabulary drills we do, books we read, or tests we take, we learn language, first, best and most retentively by simply being immersed in conversations. We hear a word. We understand it's meaning via context, and we absorb that word into our psyche as a label for a certain feeling, item, or phenomenon and then we reciprocate that cycle by repeating that word in order to express our own ideals when the situation arrives. Therefore, if the word was used incorrectly when we first encountered it, we are likely to continue the cycle of incorrect speech. But let's look at a deeper level of this issue... What happens when, instead of using a word incorrectly, we apply an esoteric value to a word that already embodies a concrete meaning?
Take the word "heathen" for example. The word literally refers to those who were never converted from the Old Ways into the Christian, Jewish or Muslim religions. Then, since Christians especially disliked those people who refused to convert to their faith, the word was slung around in a derogatory meaning by people who were speaking badly of heathens. They would talk about how horrible those barbaric, uncivilized heathens were. This spiraled on and on for generations. Now, centuries of this sort of talk later... the word carries a negative connotation, and many children, having NEVER heard the word "heathen" used correctly, understand only that a "heathen" is a bad thing. Now... consider what happens when they enter the real world on their own and encounter good heathen folk. Their first instinct is to be wary or dislike this person because they proclaim to be "heathen". Imagine that they wish to befriend this person, or even come to know of, accept, or adopt their ways... They have a mental barrier to break through. They have to undo years of programming enforced by their family, society, and the very language that they speak, in order to move on and grow past the beliefs of a past generation.
This is, to me, inherently very wrong.
Heathen, is, of course, not the only word with which I have noticed this phenomenon. I never even heard the word "pagan" until I first encountered the pagan community. By that time, I had encountered, of course, only Wiccans. Thus, when Wiccans told me that they were "pagan", I came to understand the words to be interchangeable, and did not know at all that there were pagans who were not Wiccans. It was a few years before, even while studying with members of the pagan community, I realized that pagan and Wiccan did not always go hand in hand. I met pagans who claimed to not be Wiccan... then I was confused for some time before I finally got the notion to look the word up and then, only then, did I find out what "pagan" meant. I was horrified, of course, to realize that a pagan was, originally, merely "country folk". The word carried the connotation of a "witch" or practicioner of the old ways, because the country folk were too far removed from the big city concentrations of large populations for the Christian ministries to massively force-convert them, and so they remained witches, heathens, and practioners of old faiths. Thus, pagan came to be equated directly to those who were not Christian, and THEN, with further Christian hatred applied to those not of their faith, pagans became "bad" folks to hang around. If I told my parents I was hanging out with Pagans, I was immediately branded as "going bad" and definitely worshipping the devil.
But am I really surprised? Can any of us be surprised while living in a world where words become taboo, lose all meaning, and remain taboo when no one even remembers what they mean? "Hell" is a curse word, though it refers to the underworld in many religions. "Ass" is a curse word though it refers to an animal. "Damn" is a curse word, though it refers to a condemnation. Yet "dork" is perfectly alright for grade-school children to say, even though it refers to the penis of a whale. Well by my book, that ought be quite alright to say, but no more alright to call someone in meanness than to call them an ass. What is the difference?
If I hate you and express it with known taboo words, is it really any worse than expressing it with clever substitutions for these words? In my heart, the taboo words are preferable. At least then, we're being honest. The intentions, and not the expressions, are what we should guide our children to handle carefully.
Arsh
Slightly relevant, kind of amusing (maybe only to me) input on this subject...
ReplyDeleteMy family was a very baptist family so I spent a lot of time in churches and learning the 'gospel' before I was even in school... The biblical language, as seen in the King James version of the Bible, was a base for my early understanding of the English language...
I remember a time when, to me, the term to 'know' someone meant to have been intimate with them... so someone knowledgeable was, to my understanding, a person who was well... versed in... well, intimacy. 0_o
It got me kind of confused when entering public school and hearing it... took quite awhile to understand that knowing could mean other things as well... *blinks*