The Power of Words

When I was a kid, one of the most common phrases I would hear in retaliation to insults was, “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Although this expression was common to show that this person was not really a victim of name-calling to ignore a taunt in order to avoid physical altercations, this phrase was rarely, if ever, true. Words have power. Because of this power, words do have the ability to hurt us.

Some of the most commonly used insults for name-calling are ones that target a person’s sexuality, such as “gay” or “faggot”, usually at the expense of a male.  The use of these words can be detrimental to a person, especially as kid, on the mental and physical level. The way a person responds to these types of insults can have a lasting effect. If one is defensive or hyper-masculinizes their response, this leads to suspicion and can reflect badly, leading the bully to believe you are either homophobic or homosexual yourself just because of this one word. However, the ability to appropriate these words has allowed people to slip by under the radar. For example, in the story I Like Guys, the use of the word “faggot” was used as a derogative meaning to insinuate that the person was homosexual, but David and his friend Jason were able to re-appropriate it by making it sound funny with different adjectives and advert the stereotype by not aggressively denying it. The power of these homosexual words have caused the use of saying “no homo” to be given power to say whatever a person wants without mistaking their sexually, a fear that many straight people have, so it tends to be overused with comments.

Having an ambiguous comment that could be taken sexually, mainly between males, is seen to carry too much weight unless followed by the "no homo" phrase.  

Although the word can sound demeaning, the power of words depend greatly on who is using it and the way it is said. These actions can help influence the amount of power behind the words used. Nonverbal cues such as facial cues, tone, and pitch of the voice in the deliverance of the word can greatly impact on how it needs to be taken. Again, in I Like Guys, the use of the word “faggot” was funny when said jokingly between two friends who were able to be comfortable in the presence of each other, because they would not feel ostracized. However, at the end of the story, Jason got uncomfortable with his feelings and tried to expose David as a “faggot” but due to his actions of carrying an “I like guys” sign that was supposedly David’s, it only served to alienate himself. 

Not only do actions influence the power of a word but the power that a word carries originally can make an impact on actions. The word “homosexual” has such weight to it that many, especially younger generations, strive to distance themselves from this meaning. In Go Carolina, those who would later identify themselves as the “future homosexual of America,” attempted to distance themselves from any object/actions/people that identified with homosexuality. They would stay away from others who were similar to themselves to avoid attention, and would identify with heterosexual sports that they did not even like, such as football. Even if one owns up to their sexuality later in life, such as Alex Darke in his Facebook post of I Don’t Understand, they must be conscious of their actions even if they are already “out of the closet”. He states that he has to be cautious of all the little PDA’s we take for granted, such as holding hands or even just going out with is spouse, because some who see these displays have such a powerful negative reaction to “homosexuals” and what this word implicates that spur the person into an act of violence.

So are words powerful? Absolutely. 

Blending In, Friend or Foe?

For the past eighteen years of my life I have noticed a common connection when it comes to kids and people in general, we all want to blend in. People tend to want to be the same as everyone else than to be ostracized for their differences. From personal experience, blending in has proven to be safer than to make a stance that you may not have intended to make in the first place. But I did not learn how to blend in on my own. Blending in has been practiced for so long, adults engrain social norms onto their kids, which leads to their kids blending in, and it’s all one big messy cycle. When it comes to blending in, some people can do it far better than others. Take David Sedaris for example, was a gay kid growing up in North Carolina where the holiest you could be, was at a football game. In the first chapter “Carolina” from Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris was taken out of class to go to speech therapy. It was not just speech therapy for mispronouncing your “r’s” or for a lisp, but boys who spoke with a lisp a tad too effeminate, or the pitch of their voices were a bit too high for the macho men of North Carolina. Speech therapy in general is great for kids who struggle with speaking in front of their class or other people in general, but therapy for those who don’t speak to one’s standards doesn’t seem to me to be okay at all. When is it okay to tell kids that the way they are isn’t okay? A quote that really stuck out to me from this passage is, “She was probably thinking along the lines of SPEECH THERAPY LAB, though a more appropriate marker would have read FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA” (Sedaris). These kids were being told they were different from a very young age. It wasn’t even that their differences were acknowledged, it was that the school was telling them they needed to change. They were told they needed to be “normal.” If you ask me, being normal is totally overrated, and I believe everyone deserves to be whatever the hell they feel like being. Telling someone to change for the sake of normalcy is sickening, and we need to let those kids with “lisps” that they’re not less than just because of the way they act or talk. You. Do. You.

   

Struggling in Silence

In my experience, attempting to interpret Silence from a 21^st century perspective overcomplicated the text; negotiating Silence’s pronouns throughout the book was a struggle, attempting to identify Silence as transgender made their character confusing, and much of the word choice in the translation of the original 13^th century text was questionable. Does a modern day reading of Silence render the meaning “lost in translation”?

Being born and raised in the midst of the third wave of feminism’s cultural influence, I feel like our generation is more socially conscious than most. In addressing and attempting to rectify the effects of social inequality, participating members of society consider being well informed a responsibility. Reflecting on historical transgressions through the lens of social enlightenment sometimes renders actions and events incomprehensible on our end. An example of this is when we try to make sense of someone’s poor decision making (What Would George Bush Do?), we’ll analyze the effects of their choices based on what we would have done in that situation—but everything is clearer in retrospect.

With the aforementioned word vomit in mind, is it even possible for us to really understand what the author (not the translator, it’s pretty obvious what she was thinking) of Silence really intended the reader to take away from the story? If Professor Blake hadn’t put the story into a historically appropriate context because we are students with no real scholarship in medieval literature, what would our textual analysis look like? Is attempting to apply a 21^st century interpretation to a 13^th century text dismissive of the work’s original integrity?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions and while I am certain that my experiences shape the way I read any text, the mystery behind the author/it’s publication being so very old has left me wondering what exactly the motivations and meanings that make up Silence really are.

“And the human heart is a creature

that has a strange and peculiar nature:

it thinks a great deal,

turns the deep thoughts it harbors

over and over again, far too often,

and causes itself a great deal of grief.” (Silence 125)

Okay so I’m positive this quote is not meant to be about how difficult it was for me to interpret Silence, but I am pretty sure it could be.