"The battle for the dictionary is the fight over who will be in charge of language and who will be in charge of our ability to describe the world as we see it." - Douglas Wilson, Plodcast Ep. 7
In the beginning, God made the world with words. He spoke and it was created. The Word of God spoke into existence various kinds of bodies: from light, to stars, to planets, to water, to trees, to beasts, to people. Everything that is and ever was other than God is made out of words. In other words, out of nothing other than His Word, the Word brought forth everything. There is nothing that is not made out of words. Without words, nothing would exist. The Word existed before there was anything else and everything else was made by it and through it. The world is made of words.
"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the
world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Engsoc, but to make all other
modes of thought impossible." -- George Orwell, 1984: Appendix
He who controls the words controls the world. God is the Word and He controls the world. But those who reject the presence of God do not reject the influence of words. They can't. Words are inescapable. Words are hard-wired into how God made the world. So, rather than ignoring words they way they do God, they seek to control them. They could not do the same with God. To acknowledge Him is to acknowledge an inability to control Him. If there is a God, the last thing you can do is make Him your slave. But words, on the other hand, can be manipulated, castrated, domesticated, and employed for your purposes. They can be cowed whereas God cannot.
"When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker's attitude to that object." -- C.S. Lewis, Preface to Mere Christianity
Words matter. What they mean, who gets to say them, what can't be said, and why you can't say them matter. Why certain phrases fall out of fashion matters. Why other phrases take their places matters. Words will always matter. And everyone knows it. It's almost as if words were in the beginning with God, were with God, and were, in fact, God.
"We have not only lost the concept, we have destroyed the words which could enable us to recover it." -- Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture
Words embody ideas. Words are thoughts incarnate. Without words, we lose not only our ability to think, but our ability to hear what others think or have thought. Where vocabularies are etiolated, thoughts are abbreviated. Words are important. We invent new words to keep up with our technological advances, but lose just as many, if not more, to neglect. Too many words are put out to pasture and placed in nursing homes where they are out of sight and out of mind, forgotten, and abandoned. We allow words to die and the concepts they represent perish along with them. We forget how to think in those terms because those terms have passed away into the remote past. In the end, we lose our ability to converse with our ancestors because don't speak their language anymore.
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