Summer Reading by the Pool….

One of my self proclaimed titles is “The Word Detective” I have always been fascinated by words and language and how it arose…and by what it can create. I love noticing and analyzing the way words and phrases often imply something unconscious and often unintended. The reason this is important to me is because I believe our words lead to our thoughts and in turn, our feelings about others and ultimately ourselves. So basically, words and phrases can subconsciously color our world.

There are two recent examples that come to mind that are quite common among certain peers, both in the category of describing people. The first one is “She is so well-read” OK, so well read, according to whom? According to whose tastes? Whose standards? Why do we say this? To imply others are “less well read”? I notice this because everyone in my world reads a lot but has very different interests. For some, the standard is The NY Times Bestseller List, for some it’s just classics or just non-fiction, science fiction, personal growth, memoirs, historical fiction, Oprah’s Book Club, or a selective smattering of all of the above …you get the idea…

Are phrases like this really ours? Are they power structures that were once used in the past to separate classes or people? They seem kind of shallow and irrelevant today in a multi-faceted world where people have knowledge in areas that never even used to exist. I find myself wondering.

The second phrase that catches my attention is “she has a great figure” or in some cases I’ve heard “a darling figure”. Again I ask, according to whom? Some of the people I’ve heard referred to as having such, I find myself personally repulsed by. They look like a bag-o-bones to me. Who are we to decide what figure is good or bad? Can’t there be a range? Why is there such a narrow description? Are we that distorted by our culture and media? Are we aware that when we say something like this that we are further contributing to a distorted and very limited standard of beauty? If you don’t look like said darling figure, do you deduct that your figure is “bad”? Do we realize this is what we are doing? Who’s paradigm is it?

What will we do to shift it? I believe it starts with the simplicity of noticing what comes out of our mouths. Phrases like these are all around us. I invite you to share the ones you notice.