For something that we use every day -- often all day every day, if we take into account our internal conversations and monologues -- words have gone distinctly undervalued. Sure, it’s not uncommon to hear a teacher or researcher espouse the incredibility of functional language, but its artful manipulation has, traditionally, been painted as a solely aesthetic concern.
But accepting such a perspective is limiting. Language is the primary filter through which humans see the world -- it’s used to make and recount memory, to organize thoughts and surroundings into practical pieces.
Take, for example Loftus and Palmer’s famous experiment: participants watched a filmed car crash and then were asked to describe it, given various priming words (“smashed” versus “bumped” versus “collided”). With each separate word choice, the subjects offered different -- sometimes widely different -- descriptions of the scene, adding flying glass where none existed, changing the speeds of the cars, all together reshaping the scene to fit the mold presented by language. In effect, just one simple change from a word to its synonym can reconstruct perception. Our brains want to build specific, prototypal images or concepts to associate with words, to create a world that’s functional within -- and therefore fits right into -- language. Our perceptions aren’t concrete. They’re shaped by lingual choices, both others’ and our own.
Therefore, it becomes the job of a linguistic device to challenge established perceptions. A good metaphor connects bizarre and distant objects, draws a unique equation to give a new experience. It prevents us from getting too comfortable with our surroundings -- it keeps us questioning our immediate environment and the connotations of its contents.
With political charge, a single well-wrought phrase can expose minute injustices in the surrounding world. It can reduce a problem so massive or distant it becomes incomprehensible our monkey brains into knowable terms. Explored through immediate objects, poverty and plight become relatable; an innocuous little phrase can make abstract struggles meaningful again.
Historical catalysts from Jesus to Lenin aren’t famous for the things they said so much as how they said them. The ideological cornerstones of their revolutions had long-since rattled around in human minds; they simply reassembled them, framed a burgeoning thought to make a viable challenge to the status quo, turned a notion into a vision.
Even for math majors or pre-med students, language -- beyond its bare functionality -- matters. A large portion of what we say is how we say it. Basic linguistic utilities might be survivable, but a slipshod sentence will never have the same meaning as one that’s well-written.
