Not ‘just words’: Why Donald Trump’s lewd talk mattershttps://www.yahoo.com/news/not-just-words-why-donald-trumps-lewd-talk-matters-202357692.html“It’s just words,” Donald Trump said at the second presidential debate in St. Louis last night.
But it is never “just words.”
The most recent proof of this is the 2016 campaign itself, where words have been used to shock, to push boundaries, to clarify and obscure — to demean, humiliate and mock. If they were “just words,” we wouldn’t have been talking about these particular words all weekend, and other words before them for more than a year.
True, every word starts as but a sound to which we give meaning, a jumble of letters that we imbue with weight and purpose. But from the earliest origins of speech we have known that these strings of noise are potent. From the time we tell our children to use theirs, we understand that choosing them well makes all the difference.
“For your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned” reads Matthew 12:36-38.
“Words are loaded pistols,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre.
“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind,” Rudyard Kipling said.
And, of course, Donald Trump: “I know words, I have the best words.”
This campaign has been filled with many that are not the best. On social media, Trump supporters are increasingly emboldened to use words that are historically out of bounds – c***, and k***, n***** and variations thereof — doing so because they are not “just words,” but are weapons.
At Trump rallies, T-shirts are worn, sometimes by children, calling Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton a “bitch” and worse. The glee with which all this is done — the chortling pride in the shock value, is the best evidence that words always matter.
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Far more telling than Trump’s use of the word, though, was his attempt to dismiss it. “It’s just words,” he said.
No. It’s “just” an ease with and a pride in a vocabulary that exists to dismiss and denigrate women. Explaining it away as “just words” when you call women fat or ugly; or when you send notes to a New York Times reporter telling her she has the “face of a dog”; or when you attack a breast-feeding lawyer as “disgusting”; or tweet “If Hillary can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America” — each of these gives permission to those who have taken increasing delight in using such words in this political go-round.
Words are never merely words. They are always a reflection of where a culture stands. And of what we as a society are willing to think, say and hear.
