Sayers; Words; Kim Kardashian

"At the present time, we have a population that is literate, in the sense that everybody is able to read and write; but, owing to the emphasis placed on scientific and technical training at the expense of the humanities, very few of our people have been taught to understand and handle language as an instrument of power." - Dorothy Sayers.

Sounds familiar, right? I can't pin down the exact date this essay was composed, but Sayers mentions the scarcity of eggs elsewhere, so I'm assuming this can be traced to World War II, or the period very shortly thereafter. We're talking sixty-five years ago. Now we live in a world with Twitter.* (I would love to get Sayers's take on Twitter. She possessed a biting wit bordering on and often traipsing into acerbity.)

Words have immeasurable power, but they are only tools;  they are not possessed intrinsically of any particular morality. The purpose toward which they work is dependent on the person utilizing them. As things stand, most people use words for trivialities. Most do this simply because they have never been shown or understood the forces with which they play. This, on the surface, is tragic.**

The possible implications are more terrifying. There will always be some people keenly aware of the power they can hold when they write or speak. Some of these people will have moral objections to using this power in a manipulative fashion. Some will not. Those in the latter category will not hesitate to run roughshod over people who do not recognize the power of words. These people will be flattered, inflamed, and manipulated, with little recourse.

I could really go on here and start rambling about words as symbols and the connection to real meanings and Forms and Plato.*** But I won't, because I cannot even begin to do justice to the topic in a blog post.

Thoughts?

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*I must confess, there is a Twitter account that perfectly encapsulates this phenomena of which Sayers speaks. The account contains the "philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard mashed with the tweets and observations of Kim Kardashian." It tweets jewels such as "Sunglasses & Advil... Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? How did I come here? ...last night was mad trill."

**It's like most college kids driving around carelessly in obscenely expensive sports cars they do not need and that their parents procured for them. This is not the best analogy, but the point's there.

***I do mean "rambling."