Words, Weapons, Wounds

I bloody love words. Not in a precious, apologetic way, but with the unabashed enthusiasm of someone who’s discovered that language isn’t just functional. I genuinely find it thrilling when you can find the phrases that ‘just work’ (I don’t always do it but when it happens, it’s beauty.). There’s a character in Brian McLaren’s newest novel, The Last Voyage, who has earned the irritation of multiple readers for his tendency to “use a $5 word when a 50 cent one would do.” Colfax Innis is the sort of person who reaches for “verisimilitude” when “likeness” sits right there, perfectly adequate and utterly boring. And I adore him for it.

There’s a peculiar yet powerful thing about that old childhood rhyme: sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will absolutely devastate you. The rhyme is nonsense, always has been. Words hurt. They wound. They scar. But they’re also magnificent. They’re the most powerful technology humans have ever invented, and unlike artificial intelligence or nuclear fission, we all get to play with them daily.

I love the weight of a well-chosen word, the satisfaction of finding precisely the right term for a slippery concept. “Perspicacious” isn’t showing off; it’s refusing to settle for “sharp” when you mean something more specific: a kind of penetrating mental acuity that sees through pretence. “Ineffable” does work that “indescribable” simply can’t manage. “Defenestration” is obviously superior to “throwing someone out of a window” because it’s both accurate AND delightful.

This isn’t linguistic snobbery. It’s appreciation for precision, for craft, for the genuine pleasure of being articulate. We live in an age that’s simultaneously drowning in words and starving for meaning. Every platform gives us space to speak, yet we’ve rarely been worse at actually saying what we mean. And I think that’s not just a shame. It’s actually dangerous. Because language doesn’t just describe our reality. It shapes it. It creates it. And when our words go slack, our thinking follows.

Words That Do Things

The philosopher J.L. Austin figured this out in the 1950s, though he probably didn’t put it quite so bluntly. In his lecture series How to Do Things with Words, Austin demonstrated something remarkable: certain utterances don’t describe actions, they ARE actions. When a judge says “I sentence you to five years,” she’s not reporting on a sentencing that happened elsewhere. The words themselves constitute the act. When a registrar says “I now pronounce you married,” those words change legal and social reality. When your parent says “I’m disappointed in you,” they’re not merely describing their emotional state, they’re performing an act that wounds.

“The uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action.” J.L. Austin. 

This is why precision matters. This is why the degradation of language isn’t merely an aesthetic concern for pedants like me, but a crisis with actual consequences. Words are performative. They do things in the world. They cut, they heal, they establish, they destroy. When we treat them carelessly, we’re not just communicating poorly, we’re acting poorly.

I learned this young, though I lacked the vocabulary for it then. Children understand instinctively that language cuts. My daughters know precisely which words will devastate each other, which phrases will earn parental approval, which silences communicate more effectively than any speech. The developmental psychologist Jerome Bruner observed that we don’t simply acquire language as a tool but that we’re fundamentally shaped by it. Our capacity for thought develops through linguistic structures, not alongside them. Lev Vygotsky went further: our internal monologue, what he called “inner speech,” doesn’t just reflect our thinking; it IS our thinking.

Which means that when our language degrades, our thoughts themselves become compromised. We don’t just communicate less effectively; we literally think less clearly. The tool we use to make sense of reality grows blunt, and reality itself becomes harder to grasp. It’s a vicious feedback loop, each rotation making us slightly stupider, slightly less capable of genuine understanding.

The Great British Cock-Up

And have we embraced this degradation with enthusiasm! British political discourse is a case in point. George Orwell diagnosed the problem in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. 

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell

But we’ve spent the subsequent eight decades treating his warning as an instruction manual. Watch Prime Minister’s Questions. Count the number of words deployed without conveying a single concrete claim. “Lessons will be learned” means nothing will change. “We’re getting on with the job” means please stop asking questions. “Going forward” means I’m about to say something meaningless. “Levelling up” means we’re raising taxes and pretending it’s going to make things fairer. 

Orwell was brilliant on the mechanics, 

“Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.” George Orwell

That was 1946. We’ve industrialised the process since then. The BBC, once a bastion of precise English, now traffics in the same corporate blandness as every other institution. “At this moment in time.” “In terms of.” Universities, ironically, have become complicit - academic prose has mutated into parodic obfuscation where simple ideas must be smothered in polysyllabic abstraction to be taken seriously. (Just like that sentence, in fact.)

In my work in education, I watch this constantly. Teachers and leaders use the same words - “engagement,” “progress,” “wellbeing” - whilst meaning entirely different things. We think we’re communicating because we recognise the sounds, but we’re performing a pantomime of understanding whilst failing to connect at all. It’s exhausting and utterly avoidable.

But here’s what makes this particularly galling: the flip side is so freakin’  marvellous. Because when language works, when precision meets care, something genuinely beautiful happens.

The Art of Paying Attention

The Irish novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch spent her career arguing that attention - genuine, sustained, loving attention - is the foundation of moral life. And language, she insisted, is the primary tool of that attention.

In The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch wrote, 

“I have used the word ‘attention,’ which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.” Iris Murdoch 

Notice the precision in that sentence. “A just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality.” Each word earns its place. “Just” = not merely kind, but accurate. “Loving” = not sentimental, but committed. “Individual reality” = not categories or abstractions, but the particular, irreducible uniqueness of what actually exists. This isn’t decoration. It’s precision in service of truth. Murdoch argued elsewhere, 

“Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.” Iris Murdoch

Connected to thought. Not ornamentation applied after thinking is complete, but the very medium through which thought becomes possible.

Her famous example demonstrates this beautifully. A mother-in-law, M, initially sees her daughter-in-law D as “quite a good-hearted girl, but…certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement.” Through careful attention over time, M learns to see D differently, not as “pert” but as spontaneous, not as “juvenile” but as direct and refreshingly honest. The crucial insight: M’s moral progress happened not through a decision or an action, but through a refinement of perception enabled by a refinement of vocabulary. She literally could not see D clearly until she had the right words for what she was seeing. The vocabulary created the moral vision.

Those Who Refuse to Settle

When McLaren’s Colfax Innis deploys his “$5 words,” he’s not showing off (or not merely showing off). He’s refusing to settle. He’s insisting that language can still do the work it was designed for. Its role is to capture reality with as much fidelity as human consciousness permits. Contemporary British writers understand this. Ali Smith’s novels are linguistic experiments in seeing more clearly, in forcing English to accommodate the full complexity of lived experience. Ben Elton’s plays are machines for demonstrating that wit and precision aren’t enemies of depth but prerequisites for it.

These writers know something crucial: linguistic sophistication isn’t elitism. It’s survival. In a world increasingly governed by algorithms and automated responses, by corporate speak and political contortionism, the capacity to say precisely what you mean becomes an act of resistance. When everyone else is flattening language into grey sludge, insisting on precision is almost revolutionary.

And it feels good. That’s what I want to emphasise here. The pleasure of a perfectly deployed word, the satisfaction of capturing a slippery concept in just the right phrase, the delight of being understood because you’ve taken care to be clear - these aren’t guilty pleasures. They’re simply pleasures. The work of precision is joyful work. Finding the exact right word is like finding the exact right note in music, the exact right line in a drawing. It’s craft, and craft is satisfying.

Watching Our Words

But it requires watching. Constant watching. Because the degradation happens so easily, so naturally. Orwell understood this: 

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” George Orwell

But he also knew the point is that the process is reversible. We can choose to care again. We can rebuild precision through deliberate practice. 

What does that look like practically? It starts with reading better. Not more, necessarily, but better. Read writers who give a damn about language, who treat English as an instrument capable of genuine fidelity to experience. Resist the content machine and engage with prose that makes demands on you. When you encounter a word you don’t know, don’t skip past it, look it up, savour it, try using it in conversation.

Speak more slowly. The pressure is always toward speed - quick responses, rapid-fire exchanges, the tyranny of efficiency. And it’s only aggravated by the proliferation of generative AI. Resist the temptation to sacrifice for speed. Take the time to find the right word. The person who pauses before speaking isn’t necessarily uncertain; they might simply be refusing to settle for imprecision. I’ve learned this in my coaching work and in conversations with my daughters. The pause before speech is where care lives. I’m learning it, actually. Present continuous rather than past tense. 

Refuse euphemism absolutely. This is where Orwell’s insight becomes practical guidance. 

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” George Orwell

When politicians say “collateral damage,” we must say “dead children.” When corporations speak of “rightsizing,” we must say “sacking people.” When institutions promise to “leverage synergies,” we must ask: what does that actually mean? This isn’t pedantry. It’s refusing to participate in the degradation of our shared capacity to think and speak clearly.

Practise Murdoch’s discipline of attention. Look at things - actual things, particular things - until you have the right words for them. Then look again to see if those words are actually accurate. Let the discipline of seeing inform the discipline of naming. I do this with my daughters when they describe their day. “Boring” becomes “repetitive” or “under-stimulating” or “lacking novelty.” Each refinement changes how they see the experience itself.

Build shared vocabularies with the people you actually care about. Murdoch observed that we can only understand each other to the extent that we’ve developed a shared language for what we’ve genuinely observed together. Without that shared attentiveness, without that jointly constructed vocabulary, we’re isolated. We speak past each other, mistaking familiar sounds for comprehension. The work of building these vocabularies is the work of building genuine relationships.

What We Lose When We Stop Caring

The stakes here aren’t abstract. How we speak shapes how we think. How we think shapes what we can become. When our language degrades, our capacity for complex thought degrades with it. We lose accuracy first - when “literally” means “figuratively,” when “decimated” means “destroyed” rather than “reduced by one-tenth,” we sacrifice our ability to make distinctions. Then we lose connection. Without shared, precise vocabulary, we can’t truly understand each other. Finally, we lose moral capacity as we have fewer tools with which to navigate complexity, fewer words for naming what we see, fewer ways of thinking clearly about difficult problems.

It’s why words like “genocide”, “Nazi”  or “Holocaust” shouldn’t be thrown around willy-nilly. They are far more important to those they affect than that. 

In McLaren’s novel, humanity attempts to start over on Mars, to build something better than what we’ve cocked up on Earth. One of the questions the book quietly poses: what do we bring with us? What’s essential versus merely familiar? I’d argue that linguistic precision makes the essential list. Not fancy vocabulary for its own sake, but the capacity and willingness to say what we actually mean, to name what we actually see, to refuse the lazy approximation.

Because words are both weapons and tools for understanding. They wound and heal. They destroy and create. They’re the primary technology of human consciousness, and we’ve been treating them like disposable widgets. The degradation of language isn’t a side effect of modern life; it’s one of the main events. And resisting that degradation, choosing precision, demanding clarity, refusing to settle for approximation, embracing the occasional “$5 word” when it’s precisely right. This isn’t cultural snobbery. It’s basic hygiene for thought itself.

We need more Colfax Innises. More people who understand that “verisimilitude” does different work than “likeness,” that “perspicacious” captures something “sharp” misses, that precision matters not because it’s impressive but because it’s true. More resistance to the flattening, the cheapening, the surrendering of our capacity for clear speech and clear thought.

Because in the end, language is how we make sense of reality, how we connect to each other, how we become capable of genuine moral vision. When we let it degrade, we’re not just communicating poorly. We’re thinking poorly, seeing poorly, living poorly. And that’s not inevitable. It’s a choice. We can choose to care. We can choose precision. We can choose to watch our words, not out of fear, but out of love for what they can do when we use them well.

So here’s to the $5 words. Here’s to refusing to settle. Here’s to the glorious, demanding, utterly worthwhile work of saying what we actually mean.

Five Things Worth Holding

1. Language doesn’t just describe reality, it creates it. Austin’s speech acts aren’t abstract philosophy. Every time you speak, you’re acting in the world. Words constitute reality. This means precision isn’t optional because it’s the difference between acting well and acting poorly. When you say “I’m disappointed,” you’re not reporting a feeling, you’re changing a relationship. Act accordingly.

2. Your vocabulary determines what you can see. Murdoch’s insight matters practically: you cannot perceive what you lack words to name. Expanding your vocabulary isn’t showing off but it’s expanding your capacity for moral vision. The mother-in-law couldn’t see her daughter-in-law clearly until she had better words. Neither can you.

3. Refuse corporate bollocks systematically. Every time you let “leverage synergies” or “going forward” pass without challenge, you participate in the degradation. Demand concrete meaning. Make people explain what they actually mean. This is refusing to let language become a tool for obscuring rather than revealing.

4. Build shared vocabularies deliberately. Connection requires shared, precise language. You cannot understand someone deeply without developing a common vocabulary for what you’ve observed together. This work - the work of finding exactly the right words for shared experiences - is the work of building genuine relationships and being fully human . Don’t rush it.

5. The pleasure is the point. Precision isn’t grim duty. Finding the perfect word feels genuinely good. Let yourself enjoy the craft of clear speech, the satisfaction of being understood, the delight of capturing something slippery in exactly the right phrase. The work of watching your words is joyful work. Embrace it.

The medieval monks who built Britain’s great cathedrals understood something we’ve forgotten: precision is love made visible. Every carefully chosen stone, every measured angle, every moment of attention given to getting it exactly right - that was love of craft, love of truth, love of beauty. Their work endures not despite the care they took but because of it.

Language works the same way. The care we give to our words, the refusal to settle for approximation, the discipline of finding exactly the right term - that’s love too. Love of truth, love of clarity, love of connection. Love of the magnificent, dangerous, utterly essential technology of human speech.

Bertrand Russell wrote: 

“The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich… When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit.” Bertrand Russell

I’d argue the same about language. Not everyone needs to deploy “$5 words” constantly. But everyone deserves access to precision when precision matters. Everyone deserves the tools to say what they mean, to name what they see, to think clearly about what matters. That’s not elitism. That’s basic human dignity.

This isn’t about being clever. It’s about being clear. It’s about recognising that how we speak shapes what we become. It’s about refusing to let our most powerful technology - human language - become blunt through neglect.

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