Malinda Words: Let us now march to the battleground of words

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 247th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

Revolution. It means, essentially, a turn. A turn right back. As in 360 degrees. It is a word derived from Latin — re (back) and volvere (roll). Roll back. In common parlance it is taken as a radical transformation, implying some kind of forward movement towards something very different from what things have been, not a roll-back and certainly not the re-establishment of a set of conditions that existed previously and perceived to be better than what is.

Words have lives, then. Back in the day, the word revolution was accompanied with a place name - Russian, Chinese, French, America, Cuban, Vietnamese, Nicaraguan and Iranian for example. The overthrow of colonial regimes or the withdrawal of those European powers from territories invaded and plundered may warrant the use of the word, except that it amounted to the aggressor opting for different strategies to ensure continued extraction of wealth in changed circumstances.

The word had carry and therefore, unsurprisingly, was unabashedly appropriated. We have products being advertised and brands being (re)positioned. We have revolutionary products and revolutionary brands. Indeed, we have advertising revolutions as well. Now that’s a particularly odd kind of ‘rollback,’ considering that their very existence is predicated on exploitation of a kind that calls out for, yes, revolution!

Words make narratives. Narration is a powerful way of describing processes. They are by nature interpretive and therefore coloured by prejudices of the narrator. They can be faithfully transcriptive subject to the obvious limitations of the transcriber. They can twist facts, add and subtract; they can remake events, personalities, memory and history. And so, word and language become sites of contestation where, let us not forget, those with bucks and guns have the inside track in the rays to secure the authenticity cup.

All the more reason to fight for the word. That’s what John Freeman does in Dictionary of the Undoing which he describes as ‘an attempt to build a lexicon of engagement and meaning in a time and media age that has made a mockery of those forces in our lives.’ It is an A-Z book where Freeman picks a word from each letter of the English alphabet and uses it now as a scalpel to dissect the politics of meaning and now as a chisel to reconfigure narratives closer to realities so obnoxiously disfigured by the privileged narrators of our times.

Freeman makes us see ‘how big the cave of possibility before us is, how much language - which gives us the ability to say what we mean and live within complexity - awaits our care.’ Not just our care, for he adds, ‘our use, our stewardship and our quest for beauty.’

Words. They gather dust. They are disfigured by rust. They get painted over. They look as though they’ve been given a fresh lease of life but often it’s nothing but a facelift. They are unmoored from meaning and it seems they’ve sprouted wings and float around on their own volition, but no, they are tethered to interests by the finest and yet toughest of strings; the hand that holds can send them to destinations never imagined at the time of coinage.

There are options for those who see the lexicon as an inevitable, necessary and even crucial site of struggle. Words appropriated, scrambled and reassembled to yield a different meaning, sometimes antithetical to what etymology indicates, can be recovered and rolled back. Thus undressed of frills that deliberately obfuscate or disempower, words in their naked innocence can commerce with other words similarly re-transformed. Sentences can then be constructed. Paragraphs. Books. And narrative battalions can in strategically potent formation set out to do battle with fat fibs, tall tales, creative and yet deleterious historiographies.

Freeman leaves things open ended: make your own lexicon, he suggests. When corrosive meanings have been carved on words, when they’ve rusted beyond recovery, redemption, rollback and revolution, it is not illogical to abandon them.

And so we start, in such situations, at the word-foundry, stoking creative fires with love to get the right mix of strength and tenderness, that potent configuration capable of resisting alteration best. Stewardship over words, then, is a responsibility and a non-negotiable in what Freeman refers to as ‘our quest for beauty’ which is inevitably about community and solidarity founded on uncompromising integrity. There are other battles and they need to be fought, but we should never forget or trivialize what could be the A and Z of all wars, the battle for meaning and meaningfulness which, friends, is all about words.

19 October 2023

Let us now march to the battleground of words

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