Is it always better to act than to speak?
Humans call themselves the most civilized of all creatures. If we are, it is not because we built the tallest monuments or the strongest empires, but because we learned to converse.
Civilization itself rides on a single invention: the word.
Our growth is measured in stone—in the temples, towers, and cities we built with technology and handicraft. But ideas travel only because words carry them. Societies were first systematized by words etched in scriptures, then by words written into constitutions, and now by words whispered, typed, and screamed across social media. Every tool in human history was created for welfare. And every tool, when abused, creates an anomaly its creator never intended.
Language is no exception.
Are we the only creatures that think in words, act in words, and perhaps even dream in words?
Of all languages, why did English become the most standardized? Is it because it found the most noble users? Or are there also abusers of English who corrode its growth even as they use it?
Consider how we learn. Reading and listening are one-dimensional forms of absorbing knowledge. Film, drama, and illustrated scripture are two-dimensional, engaging both ear and eye, and therefore easier to comprehend. The more dimensions there are, the easier the understanding.
Yet to ask whether a reader enjoys more than a moviegoer is a subjective debate. A reader does not just receive; he imagines, he builds his own worlds around a word.
And then there is us—the young Indians who choose to confess our love, our pain, and our rebellion in English rather than in our mother tongues. Is it because our own cinema and literature have portrayed us so conservatively, so shyly, that they never gave our native languages the vocabulary for an outspoken generation? Are we abusing our own words by refusing to use them effectively?
The richness of a language was never about how authentic the origin of every word in the language is. It is about how articulately its speakers can line them up into essays, speeches, and poetry.
Think of language as an economy and words as its currency. Just as a nation’s economy thrives when its rupee moves cleanly from hand to hand in exchange for goods and services, a language thrives when its words move cleanly from mind to mind in exchange for ideas. The more we circulate them as literature, as argument, and as prayer, the richer both the language and the state become.
In the beginning, words were created by people sharing the same environment, for one simple purpose: to understand each other and to avoid conflict.
But abusers learned to line up the same words to build hate. Most communal conflicts in every corner of the world did not start with a gunshot. They started with hate speech. Guns and bombs only joined later to amplify what words had already started. Wars are sustained not by ammunition alone, but by the abusers of words who keep them motivated.
Words are immensely influential in the hands of both the experienced user and the experienced abuser. The most famous and the most infamous leaders in history were, above all, great speakers. The propaganda spread by 1,440 bullets fired every minute for an entire day is still less powerful than a single phrase uttered by a great orator. Words have always been influential.
Religions spread because ideas were embedded in lines of scripture. People pray through words. The great clash of our globalized world is not a clash of lands, but a clash of ideas, traveling from one corner of the world to another, discovering how different we are.
In this world, social media has become either a room of confrontation or a room of infuriation. Words are exchanged, ideas collide at lightning speed. The youth of India has suddenly become vocal about the deep fault lines of the state because short, critical videos and paragraphs now flash before their eyes. Critics warn, rightly, of how hazardous this speed is—how fast an idea or propaganda spreads if it comes from the mouth of an abuser of words.
Words can be called one of the greatest inventions of human civilization, without denying the fact that they have also killed many humans.
Rationality, science, progress—none of it would be real without words, without that careful alignment of words that allows us to converse and to comprehend.
In addition to all of these, the abuse of words makes our own mental health and that of others worse. The most effective medication that therapists provide is well-aligned words.
Humans have utilized words in great ways and in grave ways, by using and abusing words.
(The views expressed are personal. The author is an undergrad research student, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research)
