Dear Editor:

Regardless of our training and education, our place of origin, economic status, or our political connections, our language reflects who we are. Too often our language has lost its meaning — largely through distortion and hyperbole. Our language has become more rigid, crude, dogmatic and over simplified. This is true of TV, radio, tweets and texting, and a good deal of our ordinary conversations.

Much of our language is reduced to verbal mockings — screaming and groaning: “Jerk!” “Stupid!” “Fool”, among worse, unmentionable characterizing. Much of our language has been held hostage to the sound bite that has become a habit, a way of talking and a way of being. Sound bites are undeveloped, unimaginative, narrow and incomplete. However, we can chuck the abbreviated tough talk and the cynicism. We know that bad habits can be broken, especially those habit that reflect the shallowness of us.

What has happened to our language? How has that affected us as persons? Our language has, I believe, lost its poetry. That is not to say that we ought to be all poets, imbued with emotional sentimentalizing. Nor does it mean that our language ought to be more restrained, more understated. It does mean that we need to regain a sense of the poetic view — more color, more imaginative experience. On literature teacher of mine once said, “A poem is like a person. And the nature of a person is open and fluid. It is intense, it is serious, and it is concrete.”

In other words, we need a new way of speaking to one another about ourselves and our world. We need the feeling of poetry; we need clearer, more concrete language, more peaceful images, more beautiful images that can make our language more thoughtful, more tuned in to who we really are.

Always, our language reflects who we are. We can reclaim the poetry and the imagery. And we can reclaim who we really are.

Most important, we can always speak openly and kindly of and to one another. We can heal the broken and degraded places within ourselves. As peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh says, “We can be peace with one another — calm, smiling and present.”

Rev. Bobsy Dudley-Thompson

Edgecomb