Words are my stock in trade. Each week it is my task to use words to convey the right idea about a moral life to an audience.
I use words, properly arranged and chosen, to transport the listener into the realm of the Almighty. Words are needed to ease the troubled mind and support those people desiring to make a positive change in their lives.
I am troubled by just how loosely words are used today. I encounter a younger generation that is missing out on the good use of language. What a shame it is that a decent vocabulary is missing.
When I was a youth, I found joy in reading the Reader’s Digest and especially the section titled “Increasing Your Word Power.” The idea was to challenge the mind to catalog and file away for some later use a number of words that would say exactly what was meant. English can be quite difficult when you don’t have enough in your tool box to say what you want to get across.
Many people have a tremendous problem with words that have multiple meanings. And then there is the problem of just how a word is used. How often I cringe in hearing a person use the subjective first person pronoun “I” when they should be using the objective form “me.” “She and I” may do something, but when something happens to the both of us, the proper phrase is “her and me.”
Now to the real issue at hand. Since words are so important, I wonder why the things I was taught about them in school, particularly at William Grant High School in Covington by a marvelous lady I will remember to the day I die by the name of Jewel R. Jackson, are not being taught today.
Sentence diagramming, parts of speech, sentence structure, vocabulary – all these components to our language don’t seem to be a part of the curriculum. If they are taught, the students don’t know their importance. They are heavily influenced by the media to use profanity that says nothing instead of words that effectively express an opinion or a path to a solution.
How eloquent were the speakers I remember hearing, not only from the pulpit, but from the books we read and from the persons who spoke stirring words. Barbara Jordan comes to mind as a real speaker of words. She had the broad selection of terms and phrases that would arouse the listener to action. Her eloquence in both delivery and vocabulary was unmatched during the years she spoke at political conventions.
Without the proper use of words, we are lost in the process of communicating. It is evident when we attempt a conversation and have to make frequent requests for clarity: “Know what I mean?”
Or when a speaker is hard-pressed to come up with a decent figure of speech yet continuously uses the term “like.” Like what? I ask. “Like, you know.” Well, honestly, I don’t know, and obviously the speaker doesn’t know either.
Until we regain our language skills, we will have a dwindling ability to converse, regardless of dialect or colloquialism. If someone from a different part of the country is hard to understand due to their phraseology, that’s one thing. But if they use proper sentence structure and a good vocabulary, that goes a long way toward enabling a good conversation.
Since texting and tweeting require little thought for spelling, these shortcuts are also part of the problem and may lead to a further decline in communication skills.
Where will we be when language is reduced to so many grunts and squeals? How will writing be restored to the days of Shakespeare, Emerson and Hemingway? Too many movies already have horrible screenplays and plots heavily dependent on automatic weapons shooting, bombs blowing up a city block and blood spurting everywhere.
The tools of expression are ever so gradually being removed from our skill set. We are today less able to articulate feelings, ambitions and desires in a sensible manner. From the pulpit, the podium and the lectern, too many speakers have become atrocious deliverers of thought and purpose.
While I applaud the rappers who can rhythm and rhyme their way into the mind of a young person, I would ask that they consider the long-term consequences of their conversation style.
Yet there is a way to involve this genre of music along with other contemporary arts in the learning process at our schools. Who knows, we may even teach our children to read more proficiently if we are smart enough to blend what they know with what we want them to know.
Richard Fowler is pastor of the Ninth Street Baptist Church in Covington. Reach him at email@example.com.