All depends how you say it.
If a local councillor expresses mild concern at the inconvenience of temporary roadworks, the headline reads " Councillor slams rogue firms amid ongoing traffic chaos". Made that up.
If a 24 year old high profile footballer for whom English is a second language comes to Manchester City and says the majority of manchester people support City, but admits he doesn't know much about Manchester, the headline reads. "Dzeco lays into United". "Star's first job to anger United". Not made up.
The devaluation of words, the addiction to verbal hostility, the habit of rhetorical over-exaggeration, - the manufacture of news by inflating the commonplace - all of them signs of a decadent discourse. By the way, exaggeration should suffice - over-exaggeration should mean the effect is dissipated by dawning incredulity - fatal to all propaganda!
Wonder how careful Christians are in the way we talk - Jesus' warning that we would have to give an account of every word we speak is another of those sayings sometimes reduced to manageability by saying it is recognised as Middle Eastern rhetoric, not literally meant. But suppose that's just the rationalising accommodation of Western minds trying to tame the wild words and moral demands of the Kingdom of God, in order to justify our own verbal proclivities? If I do have to explain every word I speak to One whose recall is entirely accurate and whose surveillance of heart, mind and voice is more comprehensive than any technology we can invent and install, I've had it. Or at least, I will have to do what in the end we all have to do - ask for mercy. But in the meantime - repent, and try harder to heed my words.
Jim, your comments on the use of language remind me of the closing notes in Stephen Patterson's "A Critique of Pastoral care" where he says that words can kill but can also raise the dead.
Posted by: Steve Langford | January 16, 2011 at 08:35 PM