By Ellie Lieberman
In Brené Brown’s HBO series, “Atlas of the Heart”, she quotes Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” Language is the foundation upon which everything else is built. It matters. What we call things matter. Why we call them those things matter. It frames our understandings of ourselves, each other, and everything around us.
Anybody who has any relationship with stories has felt that power, whether it’s a reader with a book “whispering to the page words of mutual understanding,” as I put it in my book, Society’s Foundlings, becoming engrossed in a movie or videogame, or when listening to a family member wax poetic about nostalgia and memories. And according to Brené Brown, “having access to the right words changes everything.”
Words and language are so powerful, that, as Brené Brown says, “when we mislabel things, it changes our experience with them.” Nothing illustrates this better than Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables, especially the quote, “I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I’ve never been able to believe it. I don’t believe a rose would be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.”
When I was watching “Atlas of the Heart”, this very facet of language stuck out to me in every aspect of the way Brené Brown spoke. She uses phrases like “it served me” when discussing her own trauma response. It reminded me of my brother’s phrase for these methods of survival: “superpowers.” It turns it on its head, doesn’t it? It reframes your way thinking of it. It eliminates the shame, and instead of being left with the vulnerability of said trauma, it reminds you of the strength you had to get through. It gives the power back to you.
Words and language can make us feel powerful. From my earliest memories, some of my favorite stories from Libba Moore Gray’s My Mama Had A Dancing Heart to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, there was a magic to a well-spun phrase. I could feel it then. I feel it now with books like Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea and Alix Harrow’s Once and Future Witches. My friend, Alyse, said about the writing of The Starless Sea, “it feels like magic when you are reading it. Like you are in the magic.” My mother said something similar about Once and Future Witches. I still get butterflies in my stomach when I open that book, in particular. I’m a sucker for pretty prose because it has that type of power.
Another favorite of mine is Danielle Dulsky. Every post by her leaves me feeling that way, but my mother had shared with me one of the most recent posts as I was working on this guest blog. My reaction was “she leaves you feeling like the very magic she constantly writes about. Empowering through lyrical prose, works the reader over like they are the spell being put out into the world.” It changes our place in the word, our relationship to it, and as John Keating from Dead Poet’s Society says, “no matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.”
I wrote my children’s books, The Butter Thief and The Lion’s Tooth, because I love language and each individual word is a seed that houses fascinating stories all on their own. How something got it’s name holds the same thrills for me as lyrical prose or alliteration or any other literary device. And there is so much to gain from this knowledge that can be equally empowering and life changing.
Understanding origin doesn’t just help with spelling, definitions, and pronunciation. When you learn that the origins of the word “butterfly” has ties to when people would begin churning butter and is tied to a specific type of butterfly, it connects us to our history and nature. Similarly, when you learn the word “dandelion” is a reference to the shape of the leaves and that another term for the flower, “pissenlit,” is in reference to it being a diuretic, this tells us ways to identify the plant and what it can do. There’s that connection again.
As Noam Chomsky says, “A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in language.” The upcoming book in the Basil Basset Books series explores idioms, because of this. Despite our best efforts, language is limited. The more we give ourselves the ability to play with language- and I use the word “play” intentionally because, as a child, when you don’t have the words and you are forced to play with the limitations, you push the boundaries and expand the world within your understanding of it. This is where broccoli becomes “little trees” and meringues become “cloud cookies.”- the more tools we have at our disposal to form those connections, understand our world, our place in it, our relationship with each other and, really, everything.
Just as I say in my book The Memory Tree, “life is stories,” life is language, and the more we understand of language, the more we understand of life and the more magical it and we become.
