Verbalizing the interpersonal in an impersonal world
Plus: A benediction for the post-Easter-Sunday blues
I don’t write much about what I’m reading. I’m going to do that now. As is often the case when reading multiple books at the same time, the connections come deeper and richer when ideas can cross pollinate. This cross-pollination is at work with the books I’m currently reading: On Writing Well by William Zinsser and The Life We’re Looking For by Andy Crouch.
I’ve had Zinsser’s classic on my shelf for almost 20 years but had never read it. I’m reading it now as part of a book club I’m leading at work. We recently finished the chapter on usage—all the nuances and inconveniences and debatable details about what goes into “good English.”
Our discussion eventually came around to defining the term usage. What is it? What is it good for? Why does it matter?
At the heart of usage is a heart for genuine relationship. Here’s how Zinsser finishes the chapter:
I would suggest a similar guideline for separating good English from technical English. It’s the difference between, say, “printout” and “input.” A printout is a specific object that a computer emits. Before the advent of computers it wasn’t needed; now it is. But it has stayed where it belongs. Not so with “input,” which was coined to describe the information that’s fed to a computer. Our input is ought on every subject, from diets to philosophical discourse (“I’d like your input on whether God really exists”).
I don’t want to give somebody my input and get his feedback, though I’d be glad to offer my ideas and hear what he thinks of them. Good usage, to me, consists of using good words if they already exist—as they almost ways do—to express myself clearly and simply to someone else. You might say it’s how I verbalize the interpersonal.
Emphasis mine. Good usage of a particular language in a particular place with a particular people ought to foster deeper, more real interpersonal interactions. Good words help make good relationships.
“Reclaiming relationship” is the goal of Crouch’s latest book, published last year, and which I recently picked up from the library. In The Life We’re Looking For, Crouch builds on the foundation he laid in The Tech-Wise Family to show how our easy-everywhere, “superpower” technology robs us of much of what it means to be made in the image of God as a “heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love.” As such, we are made for deep, meaningful relationships. But modern digital technologies undermine or subvert that need. Crouch writes:
Is it coincidence, or just a kind of grand irony, that loneliness has spiked just as our media became “social,” our technology became “personal,” and our machines learned to recognize our faces?
In fact, this is no coincidence. Our relational bankruptcy has been unfolding through the five-hundred-year story of technology, from its earliest stirrings in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first. There is a consistent shadow side of the bright promises and genuine achievements of the technological world: It has been based all along on a false understanding of what human beings really are and what we most need. We thought we were looking for impersonal power, the kind that doesn’t need persons to be effective. And now that we have it, with everything we want delivered straight to our doorstep by processes and systems we scarcely understand employing persons we never see . . .
This “shadow side” of this technology darkens our everyday word usage. For example, I don’t know how many times I’ve talked about “not having enough bandwidth” for this or that area of life. That is poor usage because it is using machine terminology to talk about a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love. It is poor usage because it is impersonal. I am not a WiFi router: I don’t have bandwidth, nor can I increase it. You are not a computer: you don’t have input, nor can you give it (or receive it).
Related: You are what you hum
Our words have power. What we hum to others has the power to shape them for a life of love and service. Just ask Pooh and Piglet.
Poets’ corner: A benediction, because life, even after we celebrate Jesus’s resurrection, is still life
Which is to say: hard and crazy and in need of blessing.
The last couple weeks at the Sides household have been, um, full of everything: existential crises, sick people, sick and tired people—along with good things like fox sightings (!) and all the stuff in between.
Basically, though, it was a hard crash after the high of Easter. I wrote this poem on Easter morning, not knowing how quickly it would prove to be true and needed.
The good news is that Jesus is alive, he is tending the soil of our lives through his spirit, even on the days (or weeks) when nothing feels good. Hoping these words bless you where you find yourself today.
The fox cries, "Alleluia!"
The magpie shouts, "Alleluia!"
The chickadee sings, "Alleluia!"
The buds on the ash tree whisper, "Alleluia!"The darkest corners of my heart cry, "Alleluia!"
The unbelieving crevices of my mind cry, "Alleluia!"
The cynical recesses of my soul cry, "Alleluia!"All my lingering fears of failure cry, "Alleluia!"
All of my undone to-do lists cry, "Alleluia!"
All my regrets cry, "Alleluia!"My future self—
the one a day
a week
a month
from nowwho has (already) forgotten
to practice resurrection
and live the ending,who continues to fight
disappointments
and sins and sorrowsboth old and new
(but, maybe, a little more decisively
a little more joyously
a little more hopefully
a little more kindly)—he, too, cries, "Alleluia!"
to my Gardener-Brother
to my Lion-Lamb
to my King
for making all these things
(and all other things)well.
Peace to you, friends.