Words as the Root of Human Suffering?

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

Anyone old enough to use this phrase knows how flimsy the logic really is, kind of like the rules to rock, paper, scissors. We only call upon sticks and stones when someone has attacked us with words, and we use the phrase to deflect, to diminish, to pretend at how the words don't matter. How they don't hurt. We use it to negotiate terms, both to our relationship with the attacker (you don't mean so much to me as to actually affect me) and to our own feelings (wow that stung, but I'm not going to cry, at least not in front of them). In short, words can hurt.

And this is no surprise, gentle reader. You've heard this before. Part of the growing-up process is coming to terms with the naivety of this children's phrase. But we know better. We know just how badly words can hurt. How truly twisted and evil words can be. It was with words that Satan, disguised as the serpent, convinced Eve to take the fruit; it was with words that Hitler rallied the fears of a nation into genocide; it is because of words that a growing number of drivers perish on the road while trying to balance a steering wheel and a text message. Words give voice to our own deepest fears and prejudices, our most honest and basest thoughts, whether spoken aloud or not. Words cause pain and suffering. Words, it would seem, have grave potential; even sticks and stones are no match.

Slow down, right? Perhaps not.

Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson state in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy that "human language gives rise to both human achievement and human misery." They define human language as "symbolic activity in whatever form it occurs," so we may chronicle both our greatest triumphs and most epic failures with this symbolic activity (enter iPhone text symbol or Facebook update or profile avatar here). On a less technological level, this symbolic activity includes written words. Books. Novels. Poetry. That includes quite a lot, things like the low, slow ha-ha and the barbaric yawp and the one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them and to smile and smile and be a villain and to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield and it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson claim, broadly speaking, that this symbolic exchange is at the source of human suffering because it is concretely linked to human achievement, something that has been racing forward at light speed over the course of the past century. Consider, as Hayes & Co. point out,  that "[f]ifty years ago the Oxford English Dictionary weighed 300 pounds and... today, it fits on a 1-ounce flash drive." We as humans have evolved, and with this new potential comes the possibility of not achieving it. For every ball caught, this one thrown just a little higher than the last, there must be the possibility of dropping it. Otherwise, why play, right?

As an English teacher, I see it as my job to introduce lots of words to my students. Which words to use, and how to use them. Why this word fits better here and that word there. My entire job is words. So am I contributing to the general vastness of human suffering every time the bell rings? (A rhetorical question, gentle student!)

I'm not so sure. Dostoevsky's lead characters might rail against such a claim. After all Raskolnikov and the Underground Man seem to suffer due to their excessive consciousness, not in spite of it. Words are their burden. Yet how unable, how poorly equipped would Dostoevsky be if he could not call on all his words to fully articulate this suffering? Where would Hamlet be (or not be) with his slings and arrows and eating of crocodiles if Shakespeare didn't use so many words that he was forced to create his own?

Literature would certainly suffer. But, likewise, don't we? Because words give rise to suffering?

No.

I don't think the words themselves are the root of anything. The words are not the experience, merely our way of processing the experience. My day might be simply "good" or "bad" or it could be a "sliding vortex down melancholia" or "a fabulous jaunt through rainbow bliss" but the day doesn't change based on the extent of my own personal vocabulary.

Does it?

To be continued...