words heavy and old

"Language reveals the man. Speak that I may see thee," said Ben Jonson. This quotation is a close relation to Lincoln's "It is better to stay silent and let people think you are an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." As somebody with a big mouth and as a recent recipient of the aftermath of a wagging tongue, I am experiencing the Scripture's truth about talking too much, too self-indulgently.

Wichtenstein wrote, "Words are deeds." And, as I chew on all these words on words, the phrase "pondered in her heart" comes to mind. Mary pondered things in the seat of her motivation, will, emotion and intellect. I play it off as if I'm a "verbal processor" and an extremely slow and inefficient one at that. But, there's something profound at stake that I dismiss too lightly with that flippant retort.

Our language and communication are undergoing a shift. We're converting to movies instead of books. Our spelling, punctuation and grammar are becoming far more casual. We've grown lazy and apathetic even in our vocabulary. Imprecise diction is common. We prefer instant gratification to the painstaking effort of writing precisely what we mean-- txt instead of letter writing. Perhaps there's a degree of inflation involved with the words we encounter on a daily basis. There's no devotion to the family tree of a word, etymology. We're coining words to decipher our advances in technology. But, we're no longer learning Greek and Latin. We're becoming a society of men without chests and ideas without roots (in history).

This afternoon I savored my brother's barb: "Ok, F. Scott. You remind me of a dorm master with no students, how zen like!" I enjoy witty banter as much as the next person. But, is this wrong? Is silly bad? It's just words with a different valence.

I need to be attentive to my words' weight. Venting should probably be directed toward prayer. Venting is self-indulgent in my case. And, as I taught Buddhism today, I thought about how meditation in Christianity isn't a goal of cessation of thought but of transformation of thought. James Houston called it a "psalmic consciousness". We believe our Savior is the Word and we're called to imitate him.

My rambling is a bit ironic considering the subject.