The Weight of Words
Sticks and stones and other sharp things we hurl through our phones
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”, or so the saying goes. Old adages usually carry a bit of truth, or a lot of truth, or some modicum of it but I think this one is way off.
Words are a lot more powerful than people give them credit for.
After I hung up the call, I sat staring blankly ahead unsure of what to do with all that had been said; with the horrible message delivered in soft tones that could not soften the edge of the words and the slash of the subtext.
I tried to brush it off, to put it at the back of my mind for a minute. I tried to occupy myself with something else, after all, sticks and stones, right? If I looked at my hands, my arms, and my legs, there was no visible hurt. There was no visible damage; no scar tissue to tend to.
But at the end of the day, it was still there. I grabbed a beer and sat on my balcony and tried to shake it off. The alcohol dulled something. Dulled but didn’t erase, dulled but didn’t scrape, dulled but didn’t eliminate the hurt; because there was hurt.
What I should have done when I hung up the call was to take a shower. Acknowledge the words for what they were, and turn on the shower to scalding hot water, let it clean and cauterize.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Words don’t break bones, as far as we know, but they have more power than people give them credit for. We’re readers and writers here, we should know.
Reading an article on the importance of names by a fellow medium writer, I came across a quote from Maya Angelou:
Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives, and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally into you.
The author of the article says: Careful, friend, the names you call me can become the words in me.
Around the time I started writing this, I also saw a video on Instagram, of a teacher trying to show kids the effects of words with a piece of paper. She stood in front of the class with a crisp white sheet of paper and told them to insult the page. With every negative thing the kids said about the page she would crumple it up a bit. Then she asked them to say nice things, and with every nice word and comment, she tried to iron out those wrinkles.
When she finished she asked them what the page looked like; could they see that it no longer looked the same as in the beginning? She showed them how some of those wrinkles persisted and said it’s the same with people. We are pages, and we often forget it.
Words can build houses and castles as surely as bricks, they make up languages, and cultures, and universes as no other material object or thing. Words can paint pictures as clearly as any camera, brush, or set of colored pencils. Words can bind in promise, words can give confidence, and words can unite people under a common mission and dream.
Words are powerful but they are not perfect. The right words can still be misunderstood and there are moments when words fail us all together, when there’s no combination of them to convey the feeling, wish, thought, or empathy we feel. And yet we reach for them. This toolkit is a mix of soft and sharp edges, slashing diagonals, lines, curves, holes and hooks. We’re constantly reaching for these things we call words, sometimes handling them with care and sometimes taking them for granted, giving them away, passing them on, hurling them.
When I say words can hurt. I’m not being poetic. I could write about the studies they’ve done with plants and snowflakes, the proof for the skeptics that words have an impact on the physical world. But I’m not trying to convince you, if you’re on Medium you probably already know. So I’ll use my words to wrap up this one idea, one closing thought, and one final request:
We should all be more aware that words are things to handle with care.
They can be softer than silk and rougher than rocks, lighter than feathers, and heavier than stones. Words are not “just words”, despite old sayings, they never were.
