蜜芽传媒

What鈥檚 the most powerful technology humans have ever invented? Not agriculture or electricity; not vaccination or the steam engine; not computers or the internet. More potent than any of these 鈥� and more so than any gun or rocket or bomb too 鈥� is, I would wager, the human capacity for language.

Not all uses of language suggest its technological refinement. On Sunday, Donald Trump called Vladimir Putin 鈥渁bsolutely crazy鈥�, and Russian officials the week before called Volodymyr Zelensky a 鈥渃lown鈥� and a 鈥渓oser鈥�, the geo-political equivalent of playground taunting. We have a right to expect more from public discourse 鈥� and from our own verbal lives too.

A new book by Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, tells the fascinating tale of how a tiny, long-lost ancestral language 鈥� Proto-Indo-European 鈥� gave birth to a great family of languages, including English, now used by almost half the world鈥檚 population. These languages express more than mere grammar and vocabulary. They carry with them a whole, evolving cultural memory, belief and belonging. They are vast reservoirs of imaginative potential waiting to be unleashed.

鈥淪ticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me鈥�: that well-known English proverb is a helpful reminder for anyone unduly upset by trivial or accidental misuses of language. The biblical Book of Proverbs, however, makes the point that, in certain contexts, words can actually cause great harm 鈥� or indeed, great good. 鈥淒eath and life鈥�, we are told, 鈥渁re in the power of the tongue.鈥�

To be mindful of how our actions affect others is a familiar Christian sentiment. Intriguingly, though, Proverbs has a twist in its tail. Those who 鈥渓ove鈥� language, we鈥檙e advised, 鈥渨ill eat its fruits.鈥�

The wisdom here reminds me of something Virginia Woolf once observed about clothes: that while we wear them, they also wear us. Try on a new dress or suit, or put on an unfamiliar outfit, and we not only seem to be a different person so far as the rest of the world is concerned; in some sense we come to think of ourselves differently as well. Language has that same reflexive quality 鈥� but at an even deeper level. We use words to shape the world through our interactions, but the very act of communication also changes us in the process.
Over time, we become what we speak.

Wielding our tongues, then, we have a surprising, often-overlooked moral responsibility to ourselves as well as to others. The Book of Proverbs sounds a salutary warning that, for good and for ill, the transformative technology of language recoils on those who use it. Beware. To live by verbal swords risks dying by them too.

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