In the beginning was the Word

[bumped by BenK: This is worth a read for those who missed it last night]

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. - John 1:1

This is what I have to say about the SOTU, and every other content-free political speech and op-end we're going to have inflicted on us from here on out:

There is a price to be paid for divorcing actions and concepts from the words that describe them. Government, and the law that undergirds it, is made up of words. Devalue the words, strip them of meaning, and you do the same thing to the concepts those words describe. Action follows Thought, and for Thought to exist there must be the Word.

This was George Orwell's central insight when he invented Newspeak for his novel 1984. Language doesn't just describe what we think about, and allow us to communicate with each other; in a major way, it actually determines what we think about, and how we think. We conceptualize the way we do, even in the abstract, using constructs of language - even mathematics and computer code is a kind of language. Orwell understood that the Word could actually be turned into a weapon, an invisible knife to cut away a man's ability to think (and thus, to act). All you have to do is convince a man that the Word he's hearing means something other than what he thought it meant...or can mean anything, really. Or nothing at all. Science, history, literature, even music -- they evaporate like a puddle in the hot sun because the Words used to build them stop conveying meaning.

Words have meaning. They must have meaning, for if we are to communicate at all we must transmit meaning from one person to another. This is perhaps the most unforgivable part of the postmodernist assault on the language itself: it has weakened our ability to even describe the loss of meaning.

If a Word can mean anything, it means nothing. Think of that while his Majesty the King speaks tomorrow night.

posted by Monty at 11:37 AM

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