On the Importance of Shades

I don't know how many times, in the last several weeks, I've scrolled through my Facebook feed to see a post bemoaning our President Elect's language. I'm not talking about racial slurs and grabbing pussies. I'm simply talking about his command of basic English ("bigly" and "bad hombres," anyone?).



At this point, I usually have several thoughts:

1. Is this really the thing we need to be commenting on right now, when our future head of the EPA is vowing to fight three of our biggest climate change initiatives?
2. This feels a little elitist, though of course the representative of this country should be able to speak its language.
3. This "bad English" was probably a part of the connection that he made to so many people who'd never voted before.
4. Again, why do we need to spend this much time focusing on this part of his language, instead of other, more problematic, parts?

But I also wonder what effect our diminishing vocabularies (here's an example of how many words we no longer use to describe landscape) will have on our relationships with people in the future.


I teach a composition course to first-years in college, and I find myself needing to explain why my class is more than just a gen-ed for them to suffer through before they can move on to other, more important things. The point that I land on, and one I believe is true, is that we interact with more text in our day-to-day lives now than ever before. You're reading this on the interwebs where, earlier, you might have heard it as a radio segment or seen it on TV. If you find it particularly interesting, you might text someone about it, or post it on someone's wall. All of those are text-based communications.


The thing is, most of the text we consume nowadays is functional. It's written to convey meaning as quickly and efficiently as possible, without regard for "art" or "sounding good." Frankly, that's what I teach my students–how to structure their texts and sentences so that they make sense. I give extra points for style, but we only get to style when everything else is taken care of.


What will it mean when we only write to convey meaning, when our vocabularies don'e need to include both "jump" and "leap" because doesn't "leap" just mean "jump with more effort" (for the record, Google definies jump as "push oneself off a surface and into the air by using the muscles in one's legs and feet" and leap as "jump or spring a long way, to a great height, or with great force")?

Do we really lose anything when we aggressively categorize childrens' books according to "reading level," and so remove words that are "too difficult?" When I reread the books I read as a child of 6 and 7, I'm astounded that I was reading words like astounded without having to run to a dictionary of ask my parents what they meant. I guess I just learned, early on, how to read using context clues. No one taught me how to do that. It wasn't a skill I had to learn in school. I just did it.


And, while "Just do it" doesn't work for people who don't have access to a certain quality of education, or a home environment where reading is encouraged, or books, or a whole host of other things, it's only by challenging ourselves that we figure out what we need to learn. It's only by reading things we hate or disagree with that we truly realize what we believe in terms of style and subject. It's only by using "leap" when we mean "leap" and "jump" when we mean "jump" that we'll learn how to handle shades of meaning.


So, while our President Elect's vocabulary (or lack thereof) should be number 9357 on the list of Things That Worry You About Him, it should still be on there. When shades of meaning are crushed under accusations of political correctness, we do have to worry about the future of debate, disagreement and discourse.

Read more of Rukmini's work on Floodmark.