Owning Our Words: Sounding the Depths of Language

Source: L. M. Sacasas, The Convivial Society · 2026-02-07

1. I initially conceived of this post as a relatively brief reflection on the gift of language, and the responsibilities entailed by this gift. As the earliest draft took shape in my mind, these reflections were to be anchored by something the 20th-century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote in a lecture titled “The Idea of Perfection.” “Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them,” Murdoch argued. “The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril.”

This warning has echoed in my mind for some time now, particularly in light of the rise of LLMs and chatbots over the past few years. Whatever else we might say about these technologies and however varied their capabilities, they operate on language as their raw material, language ordinarily constitutes their interface with users, and what they produce in many if not most cases is language. And because one of the foundational principles guiding my thinking is that technology cannot be understood merely as a neutral tool by which we enhance our capacity or secure a measure of convenience, then it seems that with patient urgency we should consider how these technologies will reshape our relationship with, as Murdoch expressed it, these most subtle symbols upon which our human fabric depends.

2. There are two ways of responding to the rise of language generating machines, or simply “language machines” as Leif Weatherby puts it in the title of his recent influential book, subtitled “Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism.”1 The first is to critically examine their capabilities, their promise and their perils, as well as their actual and potential consequences across a variety of domains (the economy, schools, medicine, politics, etc.) This is an important and necessary response. The second response, no less vital, is to think deeply about language itself and its role in human affairs. The critical impulse often stems from the justifiable intuition that we must weigh the risks, consider the losses, and quite possibly say “no.” But we cannot live by this “no.” We must live by and for that to which we say “yes.” We will be on better footing, all things considered, if we know the good we ought to pursue, affirm, and possibly defend. Conversely, we will be more likely to surrender, unwittingly perhaps, that which we have not learned to properly value or that which we take for granted.

Language is, of course, one of, perhaps chief among, those realities that are so ubiquitous, so woven into the fabric of our existence, nearly coterminous with the fabric itself, that we can barely see it for what it is. So what follows here is an attempt to explore various dimensions of language in a way that might inoculate us against the temptation to readily and unthinkingly outsource our use of language.

3. The poet and teacher Marilyn Chandler McIntyre has reflected eloquently and at length on the need to steward the gift of language. In Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, McIntyre observed that “if language is to retain its power to nourish and sustain our common life, we have to care for it in something like the way good farmers care for the life of the soil.”

4. What might it look like to care for language? McIntyre gives three general prescriptions: “(1) to deepen and sharpen our reading skills, (2) to cultivate habits of speaking and listening that foster precision and clarity, and (3) to practice poesis — to be makers and doers of the word.”

More specifically, she urges readers “regularly to exercise the tongue and the ear: to indulge in word play, to delight in metaphor, to practice specificity and accuracy, to listen critically and refuse clichés and sound bites that substitute for authentic analysis.”

5. “Delight in metaphor,” but only if it’s a good metaphor. In this brief exchange during an interview, J.R.R. Tolkien models one form care for language can take by showing us how to refuse a pernicious metaphor.

Reporter: “What makes you tick?”

Tolkien: “I don’t tick. I am not a machine.

While Tolkien might appear a touch cantankerous in this exchange, he is, in principle, right to contest such metaphors because they have a tendency to mediate our self-understanding and shape the way we imagine who we are and what we’re about.

On the matter of metaphor, Iris Murdoch opened another lecture, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts,” with the following claim about metaphor: “The development of consciousness in human beings is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor.”

6. Not surprisingly given the analogy to farming noted above, McIntyre draws a good deal on Wendell Berry, particularly a short essay titled “Standing By Words.” In that essay, written over 40 years ago, Berry commented on the “two epidemic illnesses” of the time: “the disintegration of communities and the disintegration of persons.” “That these two are related (that private loneliness, for instance, will necessarily accompany public confusion) is clear enough,” Berry added.

But there was something that was not so well understood in his view, and that was “the relation between these disintegrations and the disintegration of language.” “My impression,” Berry writes, “is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities.”

Notably, Berry also stated that his concern was “for the accountability of language—hence, for the accountability of the users of language.” This is a vital note to strike.

In thinking about the human predicament, I find myself returning to three key ideas: the importance of human judgment, responsibility, and language. These are quite evidently interrelated, and they provide, separately and together, a useful set of lenses through which to consider the impact of artificial intelligence as it takes the form of a language machine to the degree that it undermines our capacity to judge well, encourages the evasion of responsibility, and outsources the vital labor of articulation.

7. Berry also addressed the specialization of language in a later lecture, “The Loss of the University.” Written in the late 1980s, this lecture remains relevant today with regards to its principle subject matter, but, for our purposes, here is Berry commenting on what it means for professors to profess:

“To profess, after all, is ‘to confess before’ [....] But to confess before one’s neighbors and clients in a language that few of them can understand is not to confess at all. The specialized professional language is thus not merely a contradiction in terms; it is a cheat and a hiding place; it may, indeed, be an ambush.”

8. In Berry’s “Standing By Words,” you will find him dissecting the published proceedings of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as experts attempted to discuss how to communicate the risks of a nuclear meltdown to the public. Of this exchange, Berry observes the following:

What is remarkable, and frightening, about this language is its inability to admit what it is talking about. Because these specialists have routinely eliminated themselves, as such and as representative human beings, from consideration, according to the prescribed “objectivity” of their discipline, they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge to each other, much less to the public, that their problem involves an extreme danger to a lot of people. Their subject, as bearers of a public trust, is this danger, and it can be nothing else. It is a technical problem least of all. And yet when their language approaches this subject, it either diminishes it, or dissolves into confusions of both syntax and purpose.

And the two commissioners, struggling with their obligation to inform the public of the possibility of a disaster, find themselves virtually languageless—without the necessary words and with only the shambles of a syntax. They cannot say what they are talking about. And so their obligation to inform becomes a tongue-tied—and therefore surely futile—effort to reassure. Public responsibility becomes public relations, apparently, for want of a language adequately responsive to its subject.

So inept is the speech of these commissioners that we must deliberately remind ourselves that they are not stupid and are probably not amoral.

One hears in that last admonition, that we must assure ourselves that they are not stupid or amoral, echoes of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of Eichmann, the banality of evil, and the distinction between stupidity and an inability (or unwillingness) to think, which carries disastrous moral consequences.