"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet."
While often seen as describing the love of Shakespeare's Juliet, these lines are one of the most used illustrations of how separate words are from the things they signify.
But along with being fodder for poetic drama, the far and complicated space between words and what they point to is also a matter of public controversy, private burden and legal debate. News stories now fill the airspace on who said what and what they meant by it. And the public is being swept along.
As a society, we will always be evaluating the words we use. With their remote and shifty meanings, we need to. But in the current fervor over what some celebrity or average American has said, we are risking losing control of their shaping force to the sway of misguided, sensationalized debate.
Modern linguistics is grounded in the idea that words are arbitrary. When someone throws out the word "tree," he or she is not making a direct reference to the experience of a tree or some lonely and rigid idea of what a tree is. Rather, he or she is conjuring up the bulk of associations that make up the messy system of words relating to trees.
The earliest founders said that these systems are defined by social interaction. While postmodern thought has debunked the idea that a universal set of definitions is laid out across a cultural group, social discussion still goes a long way in dictating how people speak to each other and the realms they wade in while making their own definitions.
As societies then change, the forces that shape those rules do also.
Today, those forces in the US are rapidly changing and, as they do, are running the risk of being hijacked by the availability of obscure media, the voices of pop news commentators and the hurried efforts of the public to respond to it all.
Gone are the days of isolated groups working through their ideas with the input of nightly news stories. Now here is the day of ever-swelling YouTube video exhibiting the shocking tirades of celebrities and nameless teenage boys, alongside 24-7 Fox News pundit entertainers, and a public that loves to sit back and enjoy the ride.
The result is the streaming stories of allegedly racist, sexist and homophobic hate speech of people like Michael Richards, Mel Gibson and Ann Coulter. With the acceptance of such media, news stories loop video bites ad nauseam of teenage boys getting toddler cousins high.
As the public then grows upset, governing and judicial bodies rev at full steam, with results such as the energy being spent in the California Supreme Court to rule on the permissible use of the word "gay" in school systems. The public is losing control.
Our society cannot avoid reshaping the words we use, whether done consciously. While some individual's drunken rant or a political commentator's stand-up polemic may play a part in that, it should not take center stage.
Words are valuable. They shape how we see ourselves and how we approach the world and our experiences in it. Their discussion will continue, but it needs to be safeguarded from the fringe and sensational - being informed, not defined, by it.
The conversation of our society needs to stay tempered by the appreciation that it is shaping our world and a desire to stay reverent of that fact, while resisting the urge to sit back and absorb the videos of those who thrive on division and controversy.
Reach the reporter at: matthew.bowman@asu.edu.
