By Kim Khiat Tye
14 April 2020
Coronavirus has given social media reason to go into uber-overdrive. Posts, fake news, fake memes, trolls, and conspiracies theories centring on the pandemic have gone viral. Selfies? Being isolated does not mean that there is no room for creative self-portrayals within the confines of four walls. Ingenious selfies that attract numerous likes help buoy spirits especially in these days of lockdown and isolation. Think about the word ‘like’. It is short and simple; self-affirming and therapeutic.
Like it or not, words are not just composed of cold, inanimate letters. Rather, power and magic inhere in them. So, I would like to propose that we also post words selfie-like inviting likes or otherwise. After all, there are no fake words (only neologisms at best that may not have been codified) and they can’t be photo-shopped or tweaked.
Scrabble aficionados know the risk of coining nonce words. Most words can be validated in dictionaries, and if they are found to be of dubious provenance, they would be quickly consigned to lexical history. Imagine cyberspace and social media becoming a vehicle for spreading word power to counter what I often see in young and not-so-young people with their ever-shrinking lexicons that hardly enable them to function, communicate and engage with the community. I can vouch for this lexical poverty after two decades of trying to instil in students the importance of enhancing their word power.
Words and their usage, I often remind them, do not fall into their lap willy-nilly, native or no native speaker. They have to be painstakingly acquired. Word by word squirrelled away. Witness children from 1.5 to 5 years old building up their word stock slowly but surely. Initially, they can’t even articulate their desires or feelings with their limited vocabulary. And care-givers would be hard put to fathom what’s on their mind. But after the age of six, they acquire vocabulary at a much slower rate, generally speaking, often haphazardly.
Having a small vocabulary (my students are told in the very first lesson), is analogous to visiting a McDonald’s store, famished, but with only two dollars in the pocket. Pore over the menu, yet their hands are tied for they can afford no more than a small serving of chips and a tiny cone of ice-cream. In other words, this equates to having a small vocabulary in writing and speech. Very limiting indeed. Yet they don’t seem to feel this existential hunger for words or their lack of it to give their writing more oomph, texture and precision.
Conversely, visiting McDonald’s with $100 in the pocket will give them a free hand to satiate themselves and still have change to boot. The latter experience is akin to writing and speaking with the benefit of a rich and variegated vocabulary. It is satisfying both to the writer as well as their readers. Seen another way, just as a small vocabulary cannot rise to the occasion in a writing task, similarly, a toy piano is ill-equipped to play a Mozart symphony.
Students and adults’ insouciance to the need to extend their vocabulary can often be attributed to the absence of a systematic approach to doing so in their high school years and beyond. This is also exacerbated by their turning away from books to skimming on the internet. A decade ago, people could be commonly seen reading in public. Today, they are glued to their smart-phone screens “reading” on the go, heads down and index fingers flying. Earlier generations were told to read with a physical dictionary in hand. Sadly, the physical dictionary is languishing on book shelves or even non-existent, while online dictionaries often beg to be used. New words (if they are ever noticed) are glossed over. Year after year, only a small number of words find their way into their vocabulary even though their need for more words grows urgently in order to match their chronological age and academic levels so as to enable them to function adequately. This then results in their writing taking on an inchoate and imprecise quality much like bland food of an indistinct and unappealing nature.
We are reminded of US President Donald Trump’s paucity of words resulting in his public pronouncements often being peppered with, predictably, “great, amazing, fantastic, incredible, excellent, tremendous” like a broken record ever since his accession to office. These recurring words only attest to his lexical poverty, although it may also point to his attempts at self-aggrandisement. I suspect it is the former. As such, we can no longer take him at his word, literally speaking.
The Orwellian scenario of Big Brother reducing the proletariat’s capacity to think and foment rebellion through deliberately diminishing their vocabulary underlines the importance of the power inherent in words. With a miniscule vocabulary, the people could be easily manipulated by the state. Words were reduced to a binary choice lacking in nuances and subtleties – for example, warm, uncold; bad, ungood; unperson (a person who is executed and does not exist in the records anymore) – is a powerful reminder to us of the value of words and language to extend the frontiers of the mind and to remain mentally untrammelled. Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein sums it up neatly, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Words, after all, are the building blocks of language.
A word that is currently foremost in our minds is “quarantine”, no thanks to the coronavirus. Some people may recoil at hearing the word because of the loss of personal freedom. In actuality, the positivity of the word has been overlooked. It means the sequestering of an individual or more for the greater good especially with regard to containing an infection or a possible one.
Indeed, “quarantine” was a saviour of humanity during the Cuban missile crisis in the Sixties when the world was on the brink of a nuclear war. This word helped avert a Third World War when it replaced the initial “blockade” first used by the United States to describe its naval action against Castro’s Cuba. The naval blockade reinforced the intransigence of the Soviet Union which had planted the missiles on the island aimed at the heart of America during the Cold War. The stakes were impossibly high with neither side relenting, until “quarantine” was substituted for “blockade”. This gesture, even though nothing more than a word, mollified then Soviet President Nikita Krushchev, and he agreed to withdraw the missiles from the island without losing face. The word has the effect of reducing Cuba to an infected member of the world community which had to be quarantined to protect the rest of humanity. Its humanitarian connotation won the day, while “blockade” suggested the use of force and aggression. All told, the right word at the right time can work wonders or a wrong one, untold woe.
Imagine our lexical impoverishment if we did not have the word “selfie” which encapsulates so much in its brevity, simplicity and succinctness and garnering likes with each post. Before the internet, “selfie” would have taken years to gain global currency, but, thanks to technology, it went round the world in a matter of weeks. Words can make a significant difference to our lives when we delve into their meanings. And in the current crisis, we might just have to have a rethink about the repugnance aroused by “quarantine” and “self-isolation”. On closer scrutiny and reflection, they can have the power to persuade you to accept the strictures of the times without seeing them as an inconvenience or imposition. And we will all be the happier for it!
Come, then, let us post words with as much verve and vim as we do selfies to make our lives more meaningful. Go viral with words today!