Infinite Gratitude

Most all but the die-hard Nihilist recognize that a sense of gratitude is a worthy virtue.  Talk show hosts and their gurus promote gratitude—even suggest that one should start the day with a list of at least three things for which to be grateful.  The thank you card business seems to be doing well.  Walmart does what it can to promote your welcomes and thank yous.  Thanksgiving Day still happens once a year, every year.  And yet real gratitude is a much rarer experience in the lives of men. 

In order for gratitude to be experienced as a virtue, one must experience what it is to be grateful beyond the fleeting moment in a day. Gratitude, in the most meaningful sense, is an approach to life and an understanding of one’s position in relation to the forces that surround him.  The experience of gratitude is a humbling one for man and is preceded by the recognition of his insignificance within the universe.  When man is able to see his inconsiderable self among the billions of stars, alongside the massiveness of the planets, within the expanse of the galaxy, and across infinite time, then he is prepared to be thankful.  When fully bathed in the knowledge of his irrelevance, man may then notice that despite his utter lack of ability to stand against the infinite, he lives. 

The universe, definitively beyond man’s grasp, has recognized man and gifted him—gifted him with breath and thought and feeling.  And from breath and thought and feeling springs all that man may create.  The mere possession of these gifts does not dictate whether man will create that which is good or bad, productive or distracting.  These gifts are not a guarantee that man is a favored child.  The motion of forces that have granted man his breath and thought and feeling is just as likely to destroy all that a man has created.   But the first of these gifts (breath) is a guarantee that man exists, inexplicably and undeniably.  The remainder of these gifts (thought and feeling) grant for man’s existence that for which he might hope, aspire, dread, question and embrace.  Ultimately the power to wield these gifts in a boundless universe and to know that we wield no power at all in a consuming scape--of sea and air, gas and wind, gravity and anti-matter, propulsion and implosion--is the very reason to know complete and unreserved gratitude. 

Hyperbole and Stuff, Part II

…And Stuff

The flipside of using words with more meaning than content can bear is the common use of words that carry no meaning at all.  At one end of the spectrum of word choice there is hyperbole, at the other, there is understatement.  Sliding below the scale, there is rambling.  And in that collecting pool of wasted syllables lie words like, “thing,” and “stuff.”  The generous use of words that communicate absolutely nothing not only hinders our ability to communicate, but actually impedes our ability to organize our thoughts—or to think at all. 

An easy handful of words and phrases are regularly employed precisely because they seemingly fill the gaps of where the mind has yet to go.  For example, the word “thing,” may seem efficient when the speaker’s vocabulary-recall has failed. “Could you hand me the thing?” accompanied by the right amount of pointing and grunting, will probably achieve for the speaker the desired potholder before he burns his hand.   However, the word “thing,” is not resting behind a glass case waiting to be used only in case of an emergency.  Too often vague words are used in a manner that assumes a kind of mental telepathy on the part of the listener.  “So I tried to put the thing in the doohickey, but it wouldn’t work.”  

Increasingly we are granting a value to valueless words.  In quantitative terms, “cool” and “weird” have flooded the American language market.  The qualitative value however is nil.  These words, whatever their origins, now carry no imagery, depth of connotation, or provocation.  In the days of Jack Kerouac, the word “cool” conjured not only an attitude, but a philosophy, an approach to life, and imagery as resonant as the jazz notes that carried a generation’s ideals.  Today, “it was so cool,” means I enjoyed digitally firing at World War II soldiers, but I won’t be taking the time to provide details or to properly assess my response to the stimulus. 

The word “weird” once connoted a rather supernatural occurrence.  The word encouraged the listener to feel uneasy and to understand that the weird sound issuing from the attic could mean that your fiancé is keeping a potentially deadly secret.  Now the vague, unknown quality of the word is not used to bring attention to the most unusual nature of an occurrence, but to cover for the vague, unexamined nature of the speaker’s minimal observations: I don’t want to delve too deeply into understanding the awkward dynamics and potentially deeply psychological underpinnings of my conversation with my mother, but “that was weird.”  The level of speaking without thinking has reached rather absurd proportions without much notice.  While there are a limited number of words, the human mind possesses an extraordinary ability to continually rearrange those relatively few words for infinite expression.  And yet, “I don’t know, ya know?” is an astonishingly oft-used phrase.  Sadly, the phrase only expresses, “I can’t organize my thoughts; you figure it out.”

There are many arguments among linguists, wordsmiths, and intellectuals regarding the standards of language.  For some guardians of the English language, the modern tendency to run around willy-nilly ending sentences with prepositions is an affront not to be borne.  Others, recognizing that the correct use of the “ly” adverb is all but forgotten, still cannot help but cringe when encouraged to “drive safe.”  But the misuse of hyperbole and “stuff” is not merely a sign of a lack of standards.  Language is a living, growing result of our need to think and to communicate.  Language cannot and should not be stagnate or unchanging.  However, shifts in language should enhance our abilities to store and process information.  Words should elevate the speaker’s ability to convey, convince, enlist, challenge, clarify, suggest, demand, bargain, plead . . .  Language that allows the speaker to bypass his own cognitive abilities, or language that fails to communicate, elucidate or elicit the appropriate response is not language at all. 

Logos is from the Greek and at its basest definition, means word or speech.  But the term has rooted man’s attempt to define the principals of order and knowledge for thousands of years.  Greek, Jewish and Christian philosophers have been compelled to understand their creation, purpose, and ultimate destination as springs forth from the logos.  The logos is an endeavor to understand the awesome power of human thought and the boundless potential of language to create, organize and command into being that which has never before existed.  To squander the power of our words, to refuse the opportunity to be thoughtful, is to deny the source of human potential and “such stuff as dreams are made on.”

Hyperbole and Stuff Part I

Part I: Hyperbole or Moon Unit Zappa and the Decline of the English Language

Impressive soccer goals, entertaining concerts and the latest flavor of Cheetos are all awesome.  Acrobatic sports and video games are extreme.  Until recently, Keith Olbermann nightly reported on the “Worst Person in the World.”  Currently, the American trend toward hyperbole in the English language seems an extreme sport in itself.   Hyperbole, when well crafted, adds layers of meaning and effect.  For example, hyperbole in folk tales creates humor and friendly metaphor.  Hyperbole in poetry inspires passion and new perspective.   But overuse of hyperbole is not crafted, inspiring or meaningful. 

Linguists who study the origin and evolution of language (yes, there is a field for that) debate whether the impetus for language was the need to communicate or the need to organize thought.  For example, were the first spoken words the result of a desperate evolutionary need to express, “Would you please hand me that stick?”  Or was language developed in the mind because man’s ability to perceive information began to outweigh his brain’s ability to store pictures?  Stated differently, were the first words spoken, not in an effort to communicate, but because man needed to consider: “Where did this stick come from?  How can I make sure I always have plenty of sticks?”  Regardless of the origins of human language, today individuals and societies at large depend on words for the purposes of both the orderly processing of thought and for communicating with others.  Disturbingly though, developing patterns of speech in American culture are leading away from both clarity of communication and organization of thought. 

Common use of hyperbolic words and disproportionate metaphor obfuscate our understanding of history, and the present.  Ultimately constant exaggeration hinders our ability to address the future.  If any leader with an aggressive political will is described as Hitler, how do Americans understand the Holocaust with the true sense of horror that it deserves?  If every girl who leaves out a third-wheel friend is a bully, how do we recognize the vile impulses that ended the life of Matthew Shepard?  What words are left for the American to discover his humility and his gratitude for his tiny place in a magnificent, complicated and inexplicable world if even Sprinkles cupcakes are awesome?