The Power We Wield

It might seem like an obvious thing to say on a blog for writers, but isn’t language an utterly fascinating thing?

I have always been a lover of words, a collector of them as fine curiosities. I can remember lying in bed, as a teenager, with a dictionary on the shelf behind me, looking up words I couldn’t understand in books like ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ which I was determined to finish to impress my English teacher, who had recommended it to me. 

My youngest son has inherited my word-fascination.  On a long car journey, recently, with my husband and other son snoring their way down the motorway, he challenged me to give him some new words.  When we got back I found the evidence that he was determined to commit one of them to memory – which I photographed and got some cheap laughs for on Twitter under the caption “When you are on a long journey and have an English teacher for a Mother – no eight-year-olds were coerced or harmed in this experiment!”

I would be the first to admit, though, that I ordinarily go about my daily life, taking language completely for granted.  My appreciation of it only comes to the forefront is when I have lost my voice and can’t communicate, or when I visit a foreign country and feel like I am operating with one hand tied behind my back (although I was relieved to discover, in front of the patisserie counter at a French hypermarket last summer that “je voudrais un tranche de gateau,” was still lurking at the back of my mind, from my GCSE French lessons some 22 years previously – essentials covered!).

What I hadn’t fully comprehended until a training session at work a couple of weeks ago, was just how much our vocabulary and our language affects our education and life chances.  Ludwig Wittgenstein says “the limits of my language means the limits of my world.”  I see it so often, with the students I teach.  They are unable to fully articulate a thought, frustrated that the language they need to scaffold their thought into existence verbally or on paper, eludes them.  As teachers, we constantly encourage reading, because we know, anecdotally and through research, the huge difference that exposure to good writing can have on our students. 

As writers, speakers, educators, parents and grandparents, biological and adopted - have you ever considered the immense power for education and social change that your writing holds? That every word you write and speak could contribute to improved life chances for someone, somewhere? Aside from all the other reasons we write, isn’t that fresh motivation to put pen to paper and get our work out there, into the world?

And it isn’t just our writing that has power, but the speaking of words themselves.  As a teacher, I felt this responsibility and the power of words to change lives more keenly than ever when I read of a study that concluded that “from birth to 48 months, parents in professional families spoke 32 million more words to their children than parents in welfare families.” (Rosalind Horowitz). 

I hesitated to include this information in my post here – we are all from different backgrounds, and condemning or guilt-tripping anyone is far from my intention here.  I hope, rather, that it encourages you afresh that your words are power – the ones you hold in your pen and on your lips truly have the power, not just to entertain and titillate but to literally change people’s lives for the better.

If this has all been a little heavy for a More Than Writers post, I leave you in the light-hearted and capable hands of Stephen Fry.  Where I have failed, he will inspire you afresh that language is a truly beautiful and wonderful gift – what a joy and a privilege to be conveyors of it to others in our humble scribblings.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07f7m0m

Georgie Tennant is a secondary school English teacher in a Norfolk Comprehensive.  She is married, with two sons, aged 11 and 9 who keep her exceptionally busy. She writes for the ACW ‘Christian Writer’ magazine occasionally, and is a contributor to the ACW-Published ‘New Life: Reflections for Lent,’ and ‘Merry Christmas, Everyone,’ and, more recently, has contributed to a phonics series, out later this year. She writes the ‘Thought for the Week’ for the local newspaper from time to time and also muses about life and loss on her blog: www.somepoemsbygeorgie.blogspot.co.uk