Say What?

What has happened to our language? Apart from the strange hiero-glyphs used in texting and tweeting, such as ROFL and SMH (Rolling On the Floor Laughing and Shaking My Head)and the twisting of common words, such as “Dawg,” which canmean a pet, a friend, a promiscuous person, or something one team can do to another, as in, “We dawged ‘dem suckas’ by three TDs.”

Now we have everything “tactical” from flashlights, to knives, to guns and raincoats! Visit the sporting goods department and you can’t help but see something painted black and dubbed “tactical.” I’ve come to ignore the word, as it seems to have lost all meaning.

C.S. Lewis opined on the loss of word meanings in Mere Christianity:

The word gentleman originally meant something recognizable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone "a gentleman" you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. … But then there came people who said - so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully - "Ah but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behavior? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? …To call a man "a gentleman" in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is "a gentleman" becomes simply a way of insulting him. 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. … A gentleman, once it has been spiritualized and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.

Now if once we allow people to start spiritualizing and refining, or as they might say 'deepening', the sense of the word Christian, it too will speedily become a useless word. In the first place, Christians themselves will never be able to apply it to anyone. It is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men's hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man is, or is not, a Christian in this refined sense. And obviously a word which we can never apply is not going to be a very useful word. As for the unbelievers, they will no doubt cheerfully use the word in the refined sense. It will become in their mouths simply a term of praise. In calling anyone a Christian they will mean that they think him a good man. But that way of using the word will be no enrichment of the language, for we already have the word good. Meanwhile, the word Christian will have been spoiled for any really useful purpose it might have served.

Perhaps we need to examine the original meaning of the words we use.

Acts 11:19-26 tells us that at Antioch, followers of Jesus “were first called Christians.” What set those people apart? Was it their belief system? What about their actions and attitudes? More importantly, what makes us Christians today? Do we call someone that simply because they are “good” or could the title mean something more?

See you Sunday at the Word Place!

Rev. Bob