words, words, words

Words are what we live in. We think with them, speak with them, even act with them. Where can we live, but in words?

Language matters because, by making articulate our perceptions of the world, it defines the world. And is in turn defined by the world.

Here's literary critic George Steiner on the intersection between language and history:

"Use a language to conceive, organise, and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens; use it to dehumanise man during twelve years of calculated bestiality. Something will happen to it... Something of the lies and sadism will settle in the marrow of the language. Imperceptibly at first, like the poisons of radiation sifting silently into the bone. But the cancer will begin, and the deep-set destruction. The language will no longer grow and freshen. It will no longer perform, quite as well as it used to, its two principal functions: the conveyance of humane order which we call law, and the communication of the quick of the human spirit which we call grace."
...
...