Caring for Our Language

Caring for Our Language

by Charlie Obert, October 2020.

This essay is about the importance of language awareness in the world today. It is a vitally important topic; we need to study it to stay sane, we need it to practice astrology effectively – and, we need it to protect our political freedom, our ability to choose our own speech and thought rather than have it chosen for us.

This is going to be a wide-ranging essay. I will be looking specifically at language and astrology, and this includes the importance of recovering traditional astrology language. I want to discuss how our use of language shapes how we do astrology. Later in the essay I will branch out to the need for language awareness in a much wider sense. I will conclude with some thoughts on language and the nature of reality.

Benefic and Malefic

I want to start with a comment I saw in an astrology discussion group on Facebook.

“Is benefic and malefic still the thing anymore?”

I assume this comment came from a relative novice. This statement assumes that the study of astrology is trendy, and that it changes with fads. – you only study whatever happens to be IN this week. Being a serious long-time student of traditional astrology, I find that to be a mind-boggling concept.

I’ve written on this subject before. The concepts of benefic and malefic are central parts of the structure of traditional astrology. Dismissing them as “not the thing anymore” implies that you can ignore whatever parts of the tradition don’t happen to be in favor at the moment. That is a great loss of meaning.

I would claim that you cannot understand the depth of meaning of the astrology of 2020 without the full depth of meaning of the terms benefic and malefic. This is a period where the two malefics, Saturn and Mars, are both at the peak of their power, while the greater benefic Jupiter is effectively powerless. When all of the planets need to be interpreted positively all of the time it is very hard to explain years like 2020.

Rewriting “Unfair” Language

I have seen it argued that you should get rid of the terms benefic and malefic since they’re not fair. I’ve seen a similar argument for getting rid of the concepts of dignity and debility.

How dare you say that one person has some planets in better condition, and someone else has them in worse condition. It is unfair to say that your Venus is in a better condition than mine, that discriminates against me. Therefore we should do away with that and say that all planets are equal, all are equally good, all are equally powerful.

I have also seen it argued that planetary rulerships should be abolished since there should be no rulers and ruled, there should only be equals – that is actually just a logical extension of abolishing dignity and debility, and similar arguments apply. Planetary Equity. No, I am not making this up.

Granted, these examples I am using are extreme, but I think they illustrate a very real tendency, when learning astrology, to want to drop the meanings you don’t want to deal with for whatever reason. We want to fit astrology into our world instead of the other way around.

If you make changes like this, you render the descriptive and predictive language of traditional astrology completely worthless; you impoverish it.

A similar thing happens when you discard some of the the traditional meanings of a planet like Saturn because you don’t like them or think they’re negative. Do that, and talk of Saturn is now meaningless. You’ve impoverished your astrology language; your mental world has gotten smaller.

I am especially wary wherever I see that astrology should be changed or shaped or “deconstructed” or “decolonized” to match a political agenda. That is astrology being used as a tool for political control and mind control.

If you choose to study astrology, especially traditional astrology, study it on its own terms. If you do, it makes your world larger. If you cut the astrology down to fit your agenda, it makes your world smaller.

Words Getting Smaller

Having read many traditional astrology texts I am convinced that some of the key concepts have lost much of their meaning through the years. That happened with the terms benefic and malefic, and with dignity and debility. By now they’ve almost been reduced to plus or minus signs, benefic good and malefic ungood. Part of what I try to do in my books and teaching is to work at recovering more of the depth and subtlety of what astrology words originally meant. There’s a lot more going on there.

Studying traditional astrology involves the study of language, working with what words originally meant, what their etymology is, and how they have changed in meaning. The more I study older use of language, in astrology and elsewhere, the richer and more complex my word becomes. I can see that there are areas of human experience we’ve lost because we’ve lost the words to describe them.

Words that have Lost their Meaning

I want to give a couple of examples here of words in our general language that have changed meaning over the years, with a loss of richness, complexity and depth.

Comfort – The word now mostly means to be relaxed, in bodily ease, feeling good – you think comfort as being in a warm bed or soft chair. That was a secondary meaning of the word. The original primary meaning meant to strengthen or to regain strength. In Handel’s Messiah, the anthem “Comfort ye, my people” does not mean curl up on the couch and chill out – it means something like, take heart, be encouraged, stand up and keep going, find strength within you. The current meaning is softer, weaker, more “comfy”. I can think of no modern equivalent word that is quite as strong, quite as, well, comforting in the full old sense.

Interestingly, the meaning of comfort as strengthen is still given as the primary meaning in Webster’s online dictionary today. I cannot think of any instances of it being used that way in recent writing or conversation. Think of a general during war time going out on the field to comfort the troops – it feels all wrong.

Charity – The word now has a more narrow meaning than before – you associate it with giving money to charity, to organizations that help the needy. The word originally has a connotation of a kind of greatness of heart, a sense of mercy, compassion, caring and good will to all people. To have a charitable heart doesn’t mean you give away a lot, it means you have an active caring for all – in a religious sense it means your heart is as big as God’s heart – largeness of heart is a good phrase to catch some of its meaning. Charity was as large a concept as the word love (which is another word that’s lost much of its power), and it now feels smaller.

Adorable – The word now has a sort of diminutive and cutesy connotation, as in, isn’t she adorable? Originally it meant worthy of being worshipped, looked up to, highly honored. Look at the words of hymns that talk about adorable Jesus, and to our ears it sounds like Jesus must be really cute and lovable, while it used to mean Jesus is great enough to bow down and worship before him. Again, the word has gotten smaller in connotation. Part of the reason the word has gotten smaller is that we rarely or never look up to anyone or anything in quite the same way anymore.

There is a general pattern here: notice that all of these examples have changed in the direction of having their meanings flattened, cheapened, gotten thinner and weaker.

We understand and describe our experience using words. When our words lose meaning, human experience loses meaning. Part of recovering the richness of traditional astrology is recovering the richness of traditional words. When we do that, our lives become richer.

Astrology and the Meaning of Science

I’ve already written an essay on the meaning of the word Science. The meaning of the word Science has completely shifted over the past 200 years. It now means relying only on external measurable evidence, while the word use to mean reasoning from first principles, so the word had a vertical dimension. Unless we understand that change of meaning, any discussion of whether or not astrology is a Science is greatly weakened, greatly thinned out. I suspect that most people use the word Science with only the vaguest sense of what it means – something like, astrology must be a science because it works. I argue that astrology is not a science in any sense that a modern scientist would accept, but it is a science in the older, larger meaning of the term.

However, this is a discussion we can’t even begin to have unless we take the time to return to square one and clearly define the meanings of the words we use.

Language as a Political Tool

I want to look as some examples of words being deliberately changed in meaning to further a political agenda. This essay is not political in the narrow sense in that I am not taking sides here, but it is political in the wider sense of considering how language is being used to manipulate, to control, to confuse, and to shut down and suppress independent thought and speech. There are aspects of how language is being manipulated that I think are very dangerous, and threaten our democracy and our freedom. Language can be used to bully and coerce.

Both of the examples I am using here occurred within the last two weeks.

I am writing these words the day after Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed as a justice to the United States Supreme Court. One of the senators questioning her, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, accused Barrett of using the phrase “sexual preference” and claims that is a deliberately offensive term, and that “sexual orientation” should be used instead.

Unless Barrett happens to be up on the latest arguments in the Twitterverse I suspect she was surprised by that.

The interesting thing is that if you went out to the online Webster’s dictionary later that day, part of the meaning of the word “preference” included a note about it being offensive.

That meaning was not there the day before – I saw screen snaps of the dictionary entry that day and the day before. The online Wester dictionary definition was changed real-time to further a political agenda. I also heard that all sorts of instances of use of the word “preference” very quietly disappeared from the internet that afternoon. The dictionary plus much of the Internet were re-done to match Hirono’s agenda.

That blows my mind. The dictionary is being rewritten real time to match a political agenda. Language usage that didn’t fit that agenda very quietly disappeared. That is doubleplusungood.

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This next example shows a phrase deliberately being used in a different sense to change and dilute its meaning. This example also refers to the US Supreme Court. The phrase “packing the court” had a specific meaning – to add more justices to the court in order to shift its political orientation. It has nothing to do with just filling a vacancy.

As part of the arguments, democrats accused the republicans of “packing the court” by appointing Barrett to give the court a conservative majority. The term packing had nothing to do with filling a vacancy. So the democrats respond to an accusation of court packing by saying the republicans packed the court first.

Now the vaguer usage of the word is catching on – in his podcast the morning after the confirmation, Scott Adams commented that the court is really packed now.

The phrase “packing the court” has been diluted to the point that it is losing its specific meaning; it’s been blurred to mean, appointing someone on your team. We’ve lost a perfectly useful word, and now it is harder to talk about that particular situation. That is dangerous, because now talk about the Supreme Court and its role is being diffused and obfuscated.

Those are a couple of cases from many, of language being deliberately blurred to make clear and rational discussion impossible, and to hide what is actually happening. It is language being redefined to fit an agenda.

Words as Weapons

In political discourse beware, be aware, be wary of, words that have been redefined without telling you in order to use them as political weapons.

The most obvious example today is one of the most highly charged and most over-used terms in our current political lexicon:

Racist.

If you pay attention, it is very clear that the word “Racism” has been re-defined by one faction to mean something very nearly the opposite of what it once meant. It is also clear that the two sides of our current political divide are using that term with completely different meanings.

One one side, to be Racist means to judge a person based on their skin color – making race an issue. From the other side, to be Racist means to dare to judge people by anything other than their skin color – not making race the main issue. If you don’t make race the main issue that makes you Racist.

This now means that the different sides politically are using the same word without being clearly aware of what it means, or without being aware that it is used differently by the other side. You have people arguing over whether or not they are Racist without realizing that they are using the words in completely different senses. Most likely the people hearing these arguments have only a fuzzy sense of just exactly what the word means or how it is being used in a particular context.

It is also worth being aware of the ways in which that word is now used as a vague general perjorative with no effective content. The word Racism has been weaponized.

Calling someone a Racist is now a way to dismiss or belittle a person without having to bother taking them or their positions seriously. People may be a bit fuzzy on just what being Racist means, but they are pretty sure they don’t want to come anywhere near a person who has been branded Racist.

By being used so vaguely and indiscriminately as a political weapon, the word has lost much if not all of its original meaning, and that is dangerous. (In that sense it is like another word, Nazi, that has been so overused, and has strayed so far from its original context and meaning, that it is now nothing more than an insulting stinkbomb of a word with no real content.)

It used to be that when I heard someone described as Racist that it actually meant something specific, and I would pay attention. Now I hear of someone being called Racist and I blow it off – it now means about as much as calling someone Icky Poopy or claiming they have Cooties. It is now a vague perjorative term meaning next to nothing.

To become aware of this sort of deliberate, weaponized corruption of our language, I very highly recommend the book – “Cynical Theories” by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. It will open your eyes in a whole new way to how language is currently being used to coerce politics, and to muddy, confuse and control thinking and discourse.

Define Your Terms

To use language clearly you need to know what words mean. You need to get in the habit of defining your terms.

Today in America we are extremely sloppy with how we use language. We use terms when we have only a vague idea of what they mean, or words that we assume we kind of know what they mean. When we hear others speak we assume they are using their words in the same sense that we think we already know.

The Essential Dictionary

If you want to understand how our language has changed, I think it is ESSENTIAL to get Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language, 1828 edition.

It is available in a hardcover facsimile edition. When I finally found this book a few years back it felt like it was the dictionary I had been searching for all of my life. Spend some time working with this book and you will see just how much our language has become impoverished.

I think I have demonstrated that you cannot rely on looking up words on the internet. We have already seen that those definitions are manipulated real-time and changed to serve political agendas. Compared to the 1828 Webster’s, online you get only the most thinned-down, freeze-dried, decaffeinated versions of the definitions. Think of the online ones as Fast Food dictionaries.

Language and Recovering Traditional Astrology

Recovering the older, fuller meaning of words is especially important if you’re studying traditional astrology. I try to spend time recovering original meanings in my books, spending time on etymology and recovering original connotations. That is also why it is so very important to take the time to tackle the traditional texts themselves. In my recent book on the traditional Planets I use extensive extracts from traditional texts to try to recover the full depth of meaning of the seven traditional planets.

It is very important to learn traditional astrology on its own terms. Especially when you are first learning there is too much of a temptation to go in and redefine the words to mean what you want them to mean. Much of modern astrology does that, far more than I realized until I started studying traditional.

The language of traditional astrology stands apart from the cultural and political trends and fads of the moment. This gives you an outside perspective, a larger point of view. It gives you a place to stand outside of our current cultural myopia so that you can better see it, evaluate it, see its weak points and judge it, correct it. Expand your world to include traditional astrology and your current world gets bigger.

The Language Test – Clarity in Language

I have used the following quote before, in blog posts and in my book on Saturn. It is worth repeating here, as it is a very good technique for language awareness, what I think of as linguistic hygiene. This is the language equivalent of washing your hands thoroughly to avoid infection. I call it, The Chesterton Test.

Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves.

It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable.

If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull.

But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think.

The long words are not the hard words; it is the short words that are hard.

– G K Chesterton, Orthodoxy

When you read an astrology book, and read a meaning for a planet or sign, see if you can re-state it in simple language. There are some very good astrology books and teachers out there – and there are more than a few that rely on fogs of ill-defined words that have no real meaning but that sound really deep – books that make my brain feel like I’m wading through a room full of cotton candy in the dark.

You may find that doing this re-stating exercise will help you answer the summons of the infinite within and re-align yourself to your soul’s evolutionary trajectory of profound transformation.

You need to know enough about language to be able to tell if what you are saying has any content at all. You need to tell if you’re actually saying something. Being a lifetime reader, I can tell when I am reading if the words are clear and make sense to me, or if there is something I don’t understand, or if it is just a sea of meaningless jargon. My mind feels different, my body feels different. If you work enough with language you will develop that sense, and it is well worth taking the time and effort to do that.

This applies to our language usage in astrology, and it is also very helpful to apply to political discourse. A give-away for language that is trying to manipulate or coerce is to see clouds of long, vaguely defined words, or freshly minted jargon-words that sound like they have a Really Deep Meaning, but do not stand up to the scrutiny of the Chesterton Test. If you do not yet realize this it is easy to be intimidated by complicated sounding strings of long words. Much of the time you will learn that the fault is not with you, it is with the language.

Don’t let yourself be intimidated or confused or bullied by deliberately obfuscated language. If someone says something that sounds confusing don’t assume you are dumb. Ask for clarification, for a simpler statement, and for specific examples. You may find that the intimidating sounding argument evaporates into a cloud of meaningless smoke. Learning how to do this has been part of a political and spiritual awakening for me over the past several years. My experience is that this learning doesn’t come easily. Speaking up and asking questions is difficult, it takes clarity, and it takes courage.

Importance of Learning and Memorizing

I want to shift my discussion of language to a different level now. Here I want to touch on the deep connection of language and reality, and the depth of meaning words can have.

I have been praying regularly for a long time now, on and off for years and years. There are some prayers I have said so many times that I can say them in my sleep, and sometimes find myself doing just that. My own experience with memorized prayer is that the ones I have memorized, the ones I have said countless times, taken on an unbelievable richness. I have prayed the Lord’s prayer tens of thousands of times by now, and I still discover new depths of meaning when I say it. When I work with prayers I have recently memorized, I sometimes find I need to recite them a few hundred times before I just begin to understand what they mean. I say them over and over for days and days, and then all of a sudden, bam.

I heard a very amazing story from Douglas Murray. He talked about Terry Waite, an Episcopal priest who spent four years held captive in Lebanon. Murray talked about what Waite had to do to survive for years chained to a radiator in a basement in Beirut. One of the things he did was to recite T S Eliot’s Four Quartets to himself. While he was recounting the story, Murray himself quoted the first 8 or 10 lines off the top of his head. He heard Waite lecture, and the phrase Waite used was, “Whatever you have upstairs the bastards can’t take away from you.”

There is a depth to language we have largely lost in our speeded up world. Some of those depths can only be plumbed by repetition and memorization.

There is also a depth we can only reach by learning how to read slowly, deeply and meditatively. This collect from the Book of Common Prayer gets what I am trying to say.

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life…

That is the best description I have ever seen – hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest. Only the finest writing stands up to that process, but when it does it feeds you at a depth that is impossible to describe if you haven’t experienced it for yourself. When you read that way, when you put down the book it is now wired into you and has changed you. Reading you do that omits that is much more superficial, it doesn’t feed you or nourish you in a deep way.

Anything you read that way the bastards can’t take away from you. If you resonate to the Christian tradition, go read the parable of the Sower.

I personally need to have physical books to read for anything with any depth of meaning, and I work more now on memorizing things. I also need to have a notebook next to me when I read.

I am discovering that our digital devices are like prosthetic devices – we’ve offloaded much of our memory and thinking ability onto our phones and laptops, and our minds are weaker, like a limb you never use that atrophies.

Language, Truth and Reality

Here is where we are starting to tread on holy ground.

I am currently in the middle of a writing project where I am thinking about how astrology is grounded in eternal laws, that in some way it reveals the structure of the universe. There is a sense that language when properly used has a value in terms of referring to something that is true and real, even eternal.

Much if not most of our use of language now is just about expediency. Never mind if it’s true – is it effective, is it persuasive, is it accomplishing my purpose? Much of our discourse has severed all connection between language and reality, or language and truth. It is all about language as power, language as manipulation, language as control or oppression, and some political philosophies are built on exactly that premise. I am convinced that is a deadly mistake.

Rip words away from their root in reality and you rob language of all its power. Ultimately you destroy your own personal power and become superficial, all image with no depth, the merest shadow of what it means to be truly human. You’re a tree with shallow roots.

3 And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

4 The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.

Many spiritual traditions – Jewish, Christian, Platonic, Daoist and others – speak of creation in terms of the Logos, the Word. Ultimately, language is sacred, and we need to recover the depth of that sacred dimension to be fully human.

Be careful of how you use language. And, be careful of how language is used on you.