Careless Talk

We, like all living things, love to communicate. Indeed, we must, in order to survive.

But humans are the only creatures that communicate through verbal language. (Forget the birds). Ours is a skill that we have fashioned over countless generations into a fine instrument that is not just merely useful between ourselves but is also vitally important in the way we came to shape the entire world.

       It is not yet known with certainty where and how language originated, but some investigators think that the ability to speak arose as a single event in a location in sub-Saharan Africa something like 70,000 to 100,000 years ago. 

From that beginning, language is believed to have travelled along the paths that humans took as they followed the impulse to migrate to and populate destinations all around the world. In that journey of exploration and adventure, language underwent successive mutations into ever more varied versions of the original, embedded within the myriad cultures that emerged along the way.  The linguistic steps in these variations are marked by specific sounds that echo in many of today’s 6000 or so languages. These marker sounds provide the tools that researchers are using to trace the evolutionary stages of language from its inception to our present-day polyglot multiplicity, which allows us to convey ideas, concepts, feelings and emotions.

       Ideas, concepts, feelings and emotions are the currency for transacting with each other. Words are the fabric. We need them to give substance to human intercourse at every level. This is the reason why it is important to treat language with respect. Careless use causes problems. “Careless Talk Cost Lives” was a popular slogan that government propagandists used during WWII to caution their fellow citizens against loose talk that could have jeopardized the security of the country and endanger battlefront lives as well as those on the home front. It is well to remember too, that the state of war that led to that propaganda poster (one among many others) came about because of talk, virulent talk, that had whipped up a nation of 70 million to promote and tolerate atrocities, not just during the war itself, but also in the peace that preceded it. That war too, was the embodiment of personal ambition that was fuelled by propaganda.

       Strictures against loose and dangerous talk are as relevant today as they were eighty years ago now that the world finds itself, again, at a worrying juncture, where words are being deployed as detonator to spark passions that we thought we had buried, or at least, consigned to the subconscious. In these times the sanctity of truth does not seem to matter. On the contrary, it is the time when it must matter most.

       Those who want to dominate the world and create their own perverse version of it, launch their campaign by a direct assault on the very idea of truth, the concepts that rational, thinking people, like you and me, know to be true. These people are assertive. They are also shameless, and they are confident. So confident that they openly declare untrue, things that we know are true, and lies that they know are lies, as facts; and declare facts that they, themselves know are facts, “fake”. Reputable news outlets and agencies are constantly and openly trashed and labelled, together with their journalists, as “enemies of the people”, just because they tell truths that some may not like.

       This kind of behaviour has consequences. But, nevertheless, it goes on almost everywhere. Some follow the lead of the country that is regarded, mostly by themselves, as the citadel of civil liberties, but where the leader says facts and reality are what you make of them. Some of his listeners who lack critical thinking may even be moved to do extreme things, such as mailing pipe bombs to individuals named as “enemies of the people”, or gunning down worshippers in a synagogue on a Saturday morning.

       What goes on in America does not stay in America. Frequently, American projects become benchmarks that some follow almost willy-nilly. Fair enough, we have to take the bad with the good. But often, much of the bad supersedes the good and some leaders take the chance to bamboozle their population, at least temporarily, into accepting that what they do is exactly what the Americans do and want them to do. But in reality, it is just a cover to oppress, in the hope that people are too stupid to recognize what is being done to them. Of course, not all the people are stupid all the time.

       And indeed, in such countries, as elsewhere, there are journalists who refuse to toe the line but insist on practising their profession according to standards and whose words, consequently, put them up against the power structure, thereby exposing themselves to the risk of torture, murder, dismemberment and dispersal of their bodily remains to secret locations, orchestrated by an individual who enjoys the full patronage of the most powerful man on earth. One hundred billion dollars notwithstanding.

Tell Fren Tru