Mind your Language

“You are killing me” “You are killing me”. I opened the front door bewildered to the shrieks of my son. Of course, he was in front of his laptop playing some video game with his friends. And no, it was not some violent shooting game they were playing, but Minecraft where they build things and his loud shrieks were in response to a friend’s stupidity that the group found hilarious. This is just one of the many examples where I exasperate on his choice of words and its diagonally opposite implied meaning. I guess I should find respite in the fact that at least these are fully formed words and not the many acronyms that I’m still figuring out the meanings. Between the Bruhs and Duhs, I get an OP once in a while from him and I had to ask Alexa to understand the meaning. For the uninitiated, OP means “OverPowered” which is supposed to be a superlative, meaning “better than excellent” or something.

My son doesn’t have a phone yet. So, all his WA groups (which is just too many – school group, class group, sub groups per activity and some group even named “god knows what we are doing”) are in my phone. He doesn’t have to worry about me reading his chats for I hardly understand the memes, the gifs and the lingo. Do you know what is IYKYK? I didn’t. Apparently, it means “If you know you know”. I’d say an apt lingo for my relation with lingos. Though I genuinely wonder what people are doing with all the time they saved in typing “K” instead of “OK”. Hopefully the saved time is put to good use in saving mother earth from climate changes or solve world hunger.

See, I am a “logophile”- a lover of words. You will see it in my life choices. My favourite show is Gilmore girls for its smart and witty banters; I love stand up comedians like Trevor Noah to the moon for his articulation skills; A well written line gives me goosebumps and any day I will fall for a smart pick-up line than killer looks or branded shoes. I am one of those people who waits eagerly for the “word of the year” that is added to the Oxford dictionary every year. And hence am deeply saddened by the way our language is evolving.

It is not just that sentences are getting replaced by acronyms and emojis but words are getting assigned unacceptable meanings. Jokes apart, one of the things to notice is that most of the words in these new usages are violent. “Killing it”, “Burn”, Kick ass”. Even when I see the new words coined in Malayalam which is my mother tongue, I see a similar trend. For instance, the word “adi poli” means very good, but the word adi means fight and poli means break. How did two negative words come together to make a positive word? There are more such examples, but hope you get the gist. So, my worry is we are unknowingly normalizing violence as a society.

Language is a powerful tool that has played a huge role in the progress of human civilization. Yuval Noah Harari explains this role wonderfully in his book “Sapiens”. He says, while every animal has some kind of language to communicate, what differentiates human language is that it is amazingly supple. While a monkey’s call could communicate “Careful! A lion”, our human forefathers could tell their friends they saw a lion near the river bank and then proceed to explain where exactly the lion was located so that they could together discuss the strategy to chase it away. It is the same power of language that has helped us communicate complex ideas over generations taking us from that river bank ensuring we didn’t get eaten away by the lion to our current comfortable places surrounded with smart devices.

Gautama Budha said "We are what we think”. Chinese thinker Lao Tzu pretty much said the same thing, but he expanded the sequence for us a little bit. He said “Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”

What caught my attention here is the second step, “Words” which made me wonder whether the other way is possible too where words influence our thoughts. If yes, that could be a powerful tool to influence our thoughts and thereby our destiny, right.

 Pursuing my Eureka moment, I did a little research and stumbled upon an interesting Tedx video by Lera Boroditsky where she explains beautifully how language influences thoughts. She gave many interesting examples like that of an Aboriginal community in Australia, the Kuk Thayore people who doesn’t have the words “right” and “left” in their vocabulary and use cardinal directions “north, south, east and west” instead. For instance, instead of saying there is an ant on your left foot they will say there is an ant on your south west leg. So, in such a community they will definitely have a strong sense of direction. She gives many such interesting examples on how thoughts are influenced by the vocabularies in languages.

I think we can understand a thing or two about people based on the words they use while speaking. For instance, the other day I attended a talk on careers in education and noticed the stark difference between two speakers. One speaker used words such as “care”, “passion”, “service” in her speech a lot and another speaker used words such as “value” and “content”. The first speaker was a “Teach for India” fellow who worked among under privileged kids and the second speaker was a corporate leader turned entrepreneur. I could clearly understand the difference in mindset without even looking at their bios. Well, not to brand all corporate people as heartless value minded robots nor all people working in under privileged sector as service-oriented angels, but just the fact that knowingly or unknowingly choice of your words reflect who you are.

Having said that I’m not talking about usage of swear words or habit of cursing, but the regular vocabulary of people. For that is a whole different topic and there is already a lot of literature and debate about whether swearing is good or bad. Here my topic of interest primarily is the evolution of language, the power of words and its impact. As ChatGPT and other AI tools are taking over the world and prompting us our next word and freeing us from the burden of thinking about words, I am seriously questioning if “not thinking” about words is a good idea. I’m not expecting everyone to use poetic language or have Shashi Tharoor vocabulary, but being mindful about the impact language has on your thoughts and by extension to the society. Now that I’ve made my case, GTG for FOMO as YOLO. 😊