The Power of Language

I will confess that I am in love with words.

I love what they can do. There’s a reason the sorcerers of yore used words to cast spells. They are a magical incantation. Whether you believe in magic or not, nobody can deny that words create moods, ideas, and feelings. They’re powerful stuff.

What I love most about traveling to different places is hearing the different ways people use the same language. I’m a New York City native. People there use the language very differently than the place I now live, Maine. I lived in uptown Manhattan for years and forever enjoyed the poetry of how different ethnic groups recombined the same basic materials. You can force your language on a people, but you can’t control the way they’ll spit it back out at you. The cadences and grammatical constructions of their prior tongue come through. Just how widely the variations differ will never cease to amaze me.

Once you understand that all human language is an attempt to solve the problem of communicating ideas to other humans, it all starts to seem like different ways of solving the same problem. There’s no such thing as a “wrong” dialect. It’s a different path to the same destination.

For example, certain African American dialects favor an infinitive + progressive construction to convey casual intent. On the subway, I might hear someone explain:

”We be goin’ shoppin’.”

You have the infinitive verb ‘be’ combined with the progressive tense for ‘go’. Clipping the ‘g’ at the end of the progressive is another characteristic of that dialect. I myself would say, “I’m headed to the store,” and a speaker of Oxonian English from southern England would say, “I shall go to the store.” In that dialect, the use of ‘shall’ in the first person also conveys casual intent. None of these is better than the other. They’re just different.

German functions in a similar way to the first example.

Question: “What are you doing tonight?”
Answer: “Wir gehen Weintrinken.” Literally, that’s we + to go + wine-drinking. The second person singular remains unconjugated.

When choosing a ghost writer, you want to find someone who isn’t trying to change your voice and your cadences, unless that’s what you want them to do.

There is no “wrong” use of language. Words and grammatical constructions have a story to tell us about the places we come from. I will always honor those stories and the dialects they create. The way we deploy words says as much as the words we chose themselves. Whether it’s me or someone else, find a ghostwriter who you feel values the unique blend of place and personality that make your voice belong to you.