February 13, 2006
Words
Once in a while, my old friend and mentor Canon Quirk runs across something he thinks I need to know. He’s usually right.
This time he called and said he’d read somewhere that if you have to choose between words that mean more than what you have experienced and words that mean less, choose the ones that mean less. He said that’s because that way you leave room for your hearers to move around in and for yourself to move around in too.
One of the best cures I’ve found for reminding me to do that, I reflected, is to use a word I’m really not all that secure about, that is, that means more than I have experienced, and then to have somebody who is more secure in general, hence, curious enough to be willing to learn, ask me what it means, and I don’t know.
In seminary, I wrote a paper on William Temple’s definitive Gifford Lectures, “Nature, Man, and God.” I took issue with that giant Anglican on some point and wrote, apologetically, “Who am I to… ” The professor noted in the margin, “On you, Denson, humility is not all that becoming.” Fifty plus years later, his diagnosis is still true.
Language is what makes us human. It can also make us less than human. It enables or disables our human being. To write about stuff which means more than what I’ve experienced gets me in trouble every time. For example, I always feel more suave than comfortable when I write about CP’s garden array. She has a throw pillow that says, “Gardeners Have The Best Dirt,” and I rarely, if ever, do. Not about dirt, anyway.
To write using words that mean less than I’ve experienced, old Quirk says, leaves room for the both of us, my reader and me, to “move around.” It’s in that space, that elbow room, that learning takes place. And learning’s what life is about. It’s where we make our communion. It’s where the Word becomes flesh, as the Evangelist was wont to say, and pitches its tent… a tent filled with grace and truth (Jn 1.14).