What Words Can Do

People who love words, those who used to be known as philologists, have a special interest in what is called the etymology of words. The etymology of a word is its history, and the etymology of etymology is the study (the –logy) of an etymon (-etym), the real, true, and original meaning of a word. We speak less these days of philologists than we do of linguists. A linguist is a scientist, concerned in that capacity with the objective forms of language; a philologist is concerned, certainly, with form, but also with that to which the forms of language are thought to point, what they mean to the mind and life of human beings. Neither excludes the other, but the difference lies in emphasis and in what one assumes to be the nature of language itself.

In both the words philologist and etymology, the letters l-o-g derive from the Greek noun logos, meaning word (both oral and written) and thought. It is an ancient assumption about language that the words we speak and write begin as interior perceptions, meanings we see with our mind’s eye, which we then communicate to others by means of the objective forms of words and phrases and clauses. The notion of logos, of both interior word and exterior expression, means, then, that language is of utterly primary importance to human life and realization: it is not first a system of signs, but of symbols, and to discern the meaning of those symbols (as sounds or letters, hence, literature) is to garner insight into the nature of life itself.

That is quite a high calling for the study of language, but it is not to say that every concern about the craft of grammar and composition must necessarily have something to say about the ultimacies of human existence. It is to say, however, that there is such a thing, such a reality, as truth; that there is an etymon, the true meaning and reference of a word which is to be sought and found when we write and speak, whether in our accurate command of words or in the sentences we form with those words. To this classical conception, things matter; our actions are decided and executed according to the ideas we see first in our minds. And because we can becloud our minds with ideas that are not true but merely longed for passionately, it is of the first importance to see our ideas clearly, to see them for what they are, real or phantom.

That search for the true can only begin, of course, from the outside, from the objective forms of language, what the linguists, and before them the philologists, are so rightly concerned with. If we believe, though, as many do nowadays, that meaning is constructed, that the best we can do is make meaning, not find it, then our concern for language can begin and end with the superficial, the objective: understand what I am saying because what I am saying is true because I’m saying it is true. Whether one’s words correspond to something, whether one’s thought is a representation of what is in fact true, is unimportant to this perspective; words are not symbols of meaning to be discerned, but signs of direction, orders, and commands to be followed unquestioned. Language becomes instrumental, and culture totalitarian.

Very different is the notion that the objective forms of language direct one’s thinking, much like the boundaries and rules of any game or craft keep the mind’s direction within scope. In this other, classical view, measuring our words and thoughts in reference to the true—what we can discern with self-respecting skepticism and endorse with right intentions, uses the objective forms of grammar and structure to find the reality behind them. Understanding that true meaning with the conscientious care for language will make clear to us what is veracious and what is merely specious—that pleasing but so dangerous appearance which, for all the world, we’re sure is the truth. This ability to see nonsense for what it is has been said to be the mark of education and culture. A high calling for the study of language, indeed.

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