My Monster is WORDS!
(This was written in response to the prompt; “who or what is/are your monster/s?”)
The spoken and unspoken, the compassionate and the cruel, mine and others’.
Oh sure there are other monsters in my life, (the internalized patriarchy, sleeplessness, death, illness, suicide, my sensitive digestive system, time, my own conflicted choices, gender, certain individuals) but the more I sink into this question, the clearer it becomes; words are my nemesis. I have always been a wordsmith. Both my parents were great readers with no formal higher education who instilled in me a great appreciation for the importance of erudition and vocabulary. Half a century later, I can remember vividly the feeling of gratification created by the appreciation I received from my third grade teacher when I used words none of her other students had ever employed in response to an assignment she’d been giving for years.
Thinking of Miss Rogers, over fifty years later, I am reminded of the first time I ever heard the word “spinster” when it was said derisively about her and I cringed to have my favorite teacher mocked before even knowing what the word meant. Having not heard the word spoken aloud in decades, I was horrified to hear it come out of Amal Clooney’s mouth last year. And then this year it was used by Veronica Mars, who, along with Rory Gilmore were the two fictional sheroes of my daughters’ youths. How can this word be resurgent in use and by women we think of as icons? It is an inherently sexist word. It has no male equivalent. From the New Oxford American Dictionary; “The development of the word spinster is a good example of the way in which a word acquires strong connotations to the extent that it can no longer be used in a neutral sense. From the 17th century, the word was appended to names as the official legal description of an unmarried woman: Elizabeth Harris of Boston, Spinster. This type of use survives today only in some legal and religious contexts. In modern everyday English, however, spinster cannot be used to mean simply ‘unmarried woman’; as such, it is a derogatory term, referring or alluding to a stereotype of an older woman who is unmarried, childless, prissy, and repressed.” GRRRR!
What haunts my sleepless nights more than words? The ones I wished I had or hadn’t said. The ones I heard that wounded me or others, even strangers being verbally bullied can feel like a gut punch that revisits me again and again in retrospect. I was in middle school when I watched a bully taunting a classmate. I hugged her and brought her to the recess monitor teacher whose response was “sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never harm you.” I was disappointed at the time, but FURIOUS some months later when the same bully was putting firecrackers down the throats of frogs at recess inspiring squeals of horror and disgust from the girls and cheers and laughter from the boys. I have never stopped wondering what course his life took and what, in addition to exploded frogs, might have been saved if instead of a useless aphorism for the victim that teacher had had significant words for the tyrant.
What to do with the words that are kind, passionate, enticing, delightful, promising when spoken but in the long run cause the most harm by being meaningless or patently false. Isn’t it always words that create the monster of expectations — hope? How often have I fallen for words instead of investing the time to witness a person’s actions before gifting them my trust? Are the words to blame when I believe them to my detriment? Am I? When the actions of loved ones wound, I blame myself for expecting too much of them, for having believed their words. When their words are careless, I tell myself not everyone takes words as seriously as I do, but then I wonder why not. Recently, my heart was broken by a meme with these words; “An apology without change is just manipulation.”
When one of my daughters, around age eight, began calling herself The Grammar Police and writing tickets, I was simultaneously proud, entertained and mortified. I had inspired a monster. Is my intolerance a positive inspiration or a burden? Have I become a monster of impossible expectations? In art, architecture, music, as in words, one person’s beauty is another’s monstrosity. Who really defines what is monstrous or what a monster is?
Throughout history, humans with deformities and rare illnesses have been called monsters and freaks for not being “normal.” The person famously exploited by PT Barnum and others as “the bearded lady” was known before her death in 1902 for her efforts to stop the usage of the word “freak.” “The elephant man” actually died of trying “to sleep like a normal person.” He asphyxiated because of the weight of his head. Clearly, words can kill. Also, “normal” is a constructed paradigm in which I refuse to participate.
The word “othering” is so relatively new in use that my computer wants to change it to “mothering” which itself was not a verb in common use when I became a mother. It can be argued that othering and xenophobia are in one way or another responsible for all murders. Both the outright evil and the more insidious damage being done by words are on display daily everywhere, but have been elevated to new realms of nearly instant affect by the tweeting of the man in the White House many consider an orange monster.
There is something monstrous about the words of the constitution which have never meant enough; “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and the words of law that mean too much; “stand your ground,” for instance! So much damage being done by the constant parsing and hypocrisy around the words of our Amendments. Bryan Stevenson’s words summarize the horror of our legal reality, “our system treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.”
How about the ways in which the same word can send me down two conflicting paths? I read “life begins at the end of your comfort zone,” and I think YEAH, discomfort, what a good thing that is! Then I read, “for empaths, discomfort can signal compassion fatigue, toxic environments or the presence of narcissists and the need to improve boundaries and self care.” And I think, oh, yes, THAT!
I cringe from hyperbolic speech. “The best ever” is too subjective. “The only” has to be a lie. How can “always” ever be true?
Words like discipline and gratitude are useful reminders, but the word deserve infuriates me. Do not tell me you “deserve” a spa day or a drink. There is no such thing as deserve in a world where children are hungry or in cages or dying of curable illnesses or cancer.
At the end of last year, the word that incensed me the most was “dissident” when The New York Times repeatedly used it to describe the murdered Jamal Khashoggi instead of accurately identifying him as an author, journalist or columnist. The paper I had grown up respecting above all others chose victim blaming with that one word!
For that and so many other reasons, my word of the year was complicity.
https://medium.com/@suzyanandgarfinkle/complicity-is-my-word-of-the-year-for-2018-b3496b8303f
And this year all that I despaired then has already gotten worse and closer to home. https://medium.com/@suzyanandgarfinkle/complicity-part-2-da948d7ca278
Those from whom I have sought encouragement have been weaponizing words since I was a child. How could I want to be a writer? What could I write about? How could I be a socialist when I came from a capitalist family and had a safety net?
I have long hated the words “should,” “inappropriate” and “acceptable!” Who gets to be the arbiter and why?
On the other hand, I am annoyed by the absence of words I think would be useful.
The English language is missing a word for when I can’t say “both” because I am referring to three things. And why did “eddress” never become the single word for email address?
There is a particularly pernicious problem with the word and concept of gaslighting. Inherent in its meaning is malice aforethought and intent. In my opinion, there need to be two additional words with the following variants; a word for when we accidentally gaslight ourselves with our presumptions (hope, expectations, optimism) and another for when we experience all the negative effect of being gaslit, but there is no bad actor planning this experience for us. We are gaslit by our country and its legal system when we expect, “innocent until proven guilty,“ despite that not being the reality, for example, when innocent people await trial behind bars. And, most often, narcissists and insecure people are gaslighting not with intent to make the other crazy, but because they can’t see or think past their own best interest. Witness the debate that lives on across America about whether the president is a strategic genius or a moronic narcissist!
In response to the maddening ever increasing inundation of monstrous words we read and hear daily, can we tame the monster words in our ears, in our own hearts and thoughts and on our tongues by choosing love and poetry over fear, blame, shame and divisiveness?
Words matter, please choose them wisely.