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.”