The Power of Language
The words we speak are a lot like the air we breathe – we need the air, we breathe it without conscious effort, or even conscious awareness, yet our very lives depend on it. Like the air we breathe, we build our world and our experiences and the way we relate to one another with words, quite often without conscious consideration of the power that they have, and that changing our words can change our experiences. Words have the power to build bridges, and they can create chasms. They can bind us to one another, and they can divide us.
We will delve into an exploration of how language shapes our world, shaping our experiences, influencing cultural identities, social dynamics, the things that unite us, and the invisible boundaries that divide us. This insightful journey uncovers the profound impact of words in our daily lives and challenges us to consciously connect to the way we communicate, and connect to the power of language to shape everything about our world.
In September 1962, John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University to rally support for the US’s Apollo space program. He said:
“We shall send to the moon 240,000 miles away, a giant rocket, more than 300 feet tall on an untried mission to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to Earth. But why some say the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why 35 years ago fly the Atlantic? We choose to go to the moon. We chose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we’re willing to accept. One we are unwilling to postpone. And therefore, as we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure that man has ever gone.”
At the time he gave that speech, much of the technology needed to achieve that goal was in its infancy, or didn’t exist at all. Computers were behemoths that filled, or mostly filled, an entire room, many thousands of times larger than what could fit in a space capsule. Memory...average apple watch has 500x the total memory in the computer on board the Apollo 11 rocket. Some of the various metal alloys and fuels needed to build and launch the rocket hadn’t yet been developed. And it had only been four short years since the first launch of a satellite into space.
JFK literally spoke into existence putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth before the end of the 1960s.
In 1987, Ronald Reagan gave a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate at the Berlin Wall. The most memorable line of that speech was “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The Soviet Union had been in existence since 1922, and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev had only recently begun a policy of glasnost (openness) in the Soviet Union. The idea that the Berlin Wall, which had been erected by the Soviets and East Germany in 1961, could cease to exist might have seemed like an impossible dream. Yet, with his exhortation, Reagan spoke into existence the possibility that it could come down, and by 1989, it did.
While these are grand examples of the power of language, in fact, language is how we create and evaluate every experience in our lives. If I tell you that I am angry, what you understand about what I am feeling is not about what I am feeling at all. Rather, it is about what you understand as anger, based on your own experience of anger. And, by the way, I don’t necessarily know any more about my anger than you do. But if you ask me to describe what I am feeling in my body, and where, I might tell you that my chest is tight, I feel a burning behind my eyes, and a tension across my shoulders. You may ask me to describe those sensations, what shape they are, what color, what size. As I use language to describe them to you (and to myself), I am creating a more tangible bodily understanding of the emotion of anger that I am feeling, and a mental image of the bodily sensations. By connecting to those physical sensations that underlie what I’m describing and working to relax my body – to be present and aware of the bodily sensations and visualize shrinking the size and intensity of them – my feeling of anger begins to subside. Don’t get me wrong – anger is a real emotion, a subjective response to a physiological reaction. By exploring and identifying the physiological experience of my emotions, I’m able to understand and gain control over my subjective response.