What Do You Do with Words You Regret?

If it’s in your email do you erase it, delete it, put it in the trash.? Does that really wipe it off the memory of your computer, and another’s computer, and the files of the intermediary tech programs that handle your email? Do you have to “wipe” your hard drive?

( I know someone who thought that tossing an incriminating hard drive in the lake would make it unreadable!)

I’ll bet there have been a lot of sleepless nights about this sort of question.
I have shared information that would be embarrassing or unkind and regretted it. I have also deleted it and asked the recipient to delete it. I have been advised to delete it by someone I respect at least once.

What if you are a key person in government?

Do they ever wonder what they have written on their messaging service that might bite them back? And do they ask their staff to weed it out and zap it?

Having heard people that I come in contact with around a dinner table or in a casual conversation as I am out and about in public, I am amazed at the poisonous language they use against public figures. If someone said about me what I have heard them say about certain of our leaders (on both sides of the aisle) I would really be offended. Some of the things I’ve heard were truly ugly and hateful.

And I have heard it from young children parroting their parents. Surely a six year old child did not come home from school beating the walls and weeping about the triumph of our current president because of something someone preached at school. The kid’s mom said she needed a lot of counseling and quieting down about it. Did she realize where the language came from, and the emotional tenor?

Kids love language, especially if it’s spectacular, like that which they might hear on a TV show. They have injured-person hysterics themselves sometimes about matters like not wanting to go to bed, or getting caught in a lie. I know I am not the only mother who has been told, “I hate you, Mommy.”

Is it commonplace for us to state our adult hates and insults and rotten names for people we don’t like? Is it good to take vicious sides against political foes, and engage in verbal cussing matches while our children and others in our family are in our audience?

Words matter.

People may go to jail and surely will lost their jobs about words spoken out in epithets. Freedom of speech does not include freedom to slander, smear, or libel other people. If that is what needs to be said, let it be said formally in a court of law where it can be sorted out on the spot by a judge.

We are judged by our words. Even out of court. Every day. By judges who are not deaf to the sound or the intention. Planting such words will grow such words like sown seeds. Will we want these words said to us by our children later in life?

Lip reading is easy enough. I do it more often now that my hearing is affected by age. I see what the road rage people are saying with finger in air. I see what the footballers are telling each other after a rough play. And I remember quite well hearing my father on the phone back in the 40’s and 50’s talking to his board of directors, one by one, damning one or another of the board in vulgar language. I can remember thinking, “Does Dad really think that our neighbor Mr. G is a sonofabitch? I think he’s nice, but Daddy really hates him. Is he an enemy?” Really I can remember that, and later around the kitchen table as well.

Did it influence me to make my opinions known in that way? No, not really, because I was embarrassed that my father was so hateful to other people. I actually felt sorry for the people he cussed about because I didn’t think it was fair. Did it do what my dad intended it to do on his board of directors? I have no idea. But I did wonder what they were saying on the telephone about my Dad. What a lot of hate in our pretty little neighborhood.

Can this be good?

It really is a habit, and not just with the adult members of society. I did hear my brother at the age of four saying about our neighbor who had sent him home from playing with crab apples he had found in front of her house, “That damn lady. That damn lady.” At four!

My brother grew up with a very prickly attitude and some choice figures of speech that flowed so naturally out of his mouth to the day he died. Mostly not a fun person to know, alas.

Just wondering about this tonight.

SGHolland ©Jan 2018