The Issue at Stake

‘Poore man, thou searchest round to find out death, but missest life at hand.’ Writes George Herbert in his poem Vanitie. But even the poet needs language. Poets need language for their own ‘searching round’ to establish the truth of things, a recognisable meaning which poet and reader can discover together. But language changes with time, as new meanings, and often the social mores which shape them, emerge.

Some would say that the English language (and possibly others too) has been impoverished by twitter, instagram (along with its lookalikes) and the smart phone. These have, of necessity, had to make a language of their own in order to save space, time and money. The same often goes for journalistic and academic writing. The acronym rules, the assumption being that everyone knows, or will remember, what the series of capital letters stands for. The reader supposedly fills in the missing letters and knows at once who or what is being referred to. The same goes for texting and abbreviated twitter posts. You ‘get’ the meaning– or perhaps you don’t.

What is left unsaid can hold a wealth of meaning. This usually happens when a word which could be translated in a number of ways has no complementary word or phrase to give it its correct value and to place it in a commonly agreed context – in other words, ‘what we are talking about’ in any verbal exchange. Take, for example, the word ‘issue’. It can be a verb or a noun, but it is the increasing use of the word as a noun which I think is of special significance. You have an ‘issue’ with someone. Or someone else has ‘issues’.

To say this begs a number of unanswerable questions. Assuming that we are still talking about nouns, what is the thing, or object that one person can ‘have’ with another? And, not to take it to the absurd what, then, does that person mean when they say that someone else has unspecified ‘issues’? I suspect that the answer lies somewhere in the question, and with the person asking it. They are signalling that something (the ‘issue’) which is making another person unhappy or angry is, in some measure at least, also making the one who made the observation unhappy, anxious or angry – or possibly all three.

I do not wish to sound pedantic, but the nitty gritty of this question interests me because I think that many conflicts between individuals originate in the abuse or misuse of language. A word like ‘issue’, unqualified, leaves too much to intuition and guess work. Intuition and guess work are subject to the imagination and that in turn can be defined by, or subject to, circumstances. If, for example, I am accused of having ‘issues’, or if I accuse someone else of the same, does the accusation in fact have more to do with my own immediate circumstances and/or relationship with the person in question? Or is it entirely ‘their problem’?

The fact is that we are bound up in a common history, the history of the human race. All language is contextual. The most passing remark is traceable to other conversations and to the relationships and contexts (social, religious, economic, to name only three) which have shaped us. But this is not the end of the story, because the purpose of language is very much tied to God. God brought order out of chaos. He ‘spoke’, metaphorically, into chaos and darkness, and he continues to do so when we use language to heal and re-create. Language exists to enlighten in the fullest sense, to bring order and understanding into human emotions and into the destructive chaos to which they can give rise, war being the most destructive of all.

If we are to take the Christian Gospel seriously, we cannot avoid the question which Jesus continually asked of those who challenged him, ‘How do you read?’ There is no quick or easy answer to this question. It also obliges the one who prompted it to take a measure of responsibility for the answer, in other words for the other person. So the word ‘issue’ begs still more important questions. We cannot use it in relation to someone else without seeing the bigger picture, beginning with the part we ourselves play in the other person’s ‘issues’. Using short-hand language is a way of opting out of the painful responsibility we must take both for what we actually say and for how it is heard.

One of the signs that we are becoming more aware of this is that words which were once used to describe people who are in any way ‘different’ are now unacceptable. Today’s social mores oblige us to think before we speak. We are accountable for the way we both ask and answer the question ‘How do you read?’, and that is the issue at stake in politics and in all human exchanges.