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AustinMama offers up some Daddy props.
- Robert A. Heinlein
What's in a Word?
There is almost no aspect of our lives that is untouched by language,
and parenting takes a quantum leap forward when we find better ways to
communicate with our offspring effectively. Thankfully, since 70% of
human communication is non-verbal, we don’t need to wait for our
children to develop a sophisticated vocabulary to begin laying an
effective foundation for understanding each other. Eye to eye contact,
open body posture and soft tones help bring any child’s focus into
listening; be sure to mirror them back when your child speaks to you.
Even in later years, children hear and respond to the tone of a message
before they absorb any of the content, a revelation that can defuse
many an argument. Even more interesting, though, is the psychology of
the words themselves. Why not learn some words that could make a *very*
big difference in your child's vocabulary?
Alfred Korzybski, who founded the field of general semantics, brought
forward the radical idea that as the tool we use to frame our thoughts
and perceptions, our language literally directs what we are able to
think. Sartre, for example, couldn’t have made the philosophical leap
“I think, therefore I am” if he thought in a language that didn’t put
the subject before the verb in a sentence. To his mind, the subject
naturally “came first.” Korzybski proposed the idea of a revised
English language he called E-prime, which is basically English without
the absolutism of the word ‘is’; statements about what things ‘are’
become statements about how they ‘seem.’ Thinking like a scientist,
Korzybski felt we should be honest in conversation about our lack of
empirical data about the universe, and you can imagine how popular the
idea was by the fact that most of you have never heard of this before.
Robert Anton Wilson, another great thinker, endorses the further
replacement of the word ‘all’ with the compound word ‘sombunall,’ which
means ‘some but not all.’ His argument is more compelling, though:
would the warfare, intolerance and bigotry our world is prone to be
possible if we couldn’t make inflammatory statements like “all blacks
are thieves” and instead claimed “some but not all blacks seem to be
thieves to me.” Perhaps the holocaust might not have happened if the
Germans of Hitler’s day had spoken something like G-prime and universal
claims about Jews simply couldn’t be made.
This kind of linguistic jiggery-pokery feels pretty awkward to most of
us, and I’ve thus far been completely unable to train my brain to
vocalize in E-prime. Frankly, I enjoy being occasionally inflammatory.
The only folk out there writing in E-prime are scientists, who tend
towards it in scientific papers without consciously knowing the
concept, and Wilson himself. Still, introducing words like sombunall
to our children when their minds are still receptive to new concepts is
literally expanding the horizon of how they are able to think. A
simple three syllable tool for being more empathetic, flexible and
open minded is a mental bargain.
The most astounding word I can drop here is “Po,” a term coined by
Edward De Bono, probably the world’s foremost teacher of thinking
skills. He claims that ‘No’ is the basic tool of the logic system,
‘Yes’ is the basic tool of the belief system, and ‘Po’ stands right up
there with them in importance as the basic tool of the creative system.
I can’t do his book Po: Beyond Yes and No justice here, but to
paraphrase terribly, the word means “I accept that as one way of
looking at things.” You can use it to defuse an argument by suggesting
that both perspectives are valid, and to suggest ‘what if’ scenarios to
challenge established thinking. A ludicrous statement like “Po we
should all be president,” even if it’s impossible, can lead to thinking
about new ways that the electorate could vote on specific issues rather
than just a single leader and all the particulars of his platform, and
thus take you to another less infeasible and more useful idea. Po is
like the reverse gear on a car that helps you back out of a blind alley
of logic or an established way of looking at things.
To me, however, the coolest use of Po is that you can use it to
deliberately juxtapose two things that wouldn’t normally go together as
a creative thinking exercise. Let’s say we randomly stick ‘politics’
and ‘bottles’ together and see what ideas we can come up with. I
remember returning bottles for a deposit I paid on them, so what if we
voted on how well we felt represented by a politician after their term
and they had to return a portion of their salary relative to the
electorate’s dissatisfaction? Would it change campaigning forever? If
not, it’s at least a jumping off point for a short story, and a billion
other ideas can come out of the same or other random groupings.
Darwin’s theory of evolution was basically the result of putting the
ideas of ‘species’ and ‘change’ together for the first time, while
Einstein’s relativity similarly began as something like ‘space’ Po
‘time.’ De Bono argues that Po is not only basic to creative
innovation, but also the root of humor, since bicycle and road are
mundane together but it’s the unexpectedness of bicycle Po fish that
can be funny. What’s astounding is how readily younger minds embrace
this concept and run with it. As adults, we may have proceeded from
‘why’ to ‘why not’ and finally into ‘because,’ the mental stance that
creates the aphorism about old dogs learning new tricks, but our
children never have to lose the ability to constantly see things in new
ways and learn from it. The earlier someone picks up this sort of
gymnastic language, the more it becomes second nature and the easier
they reap the benefits.
While our yes/no Aristotelian logic is an excellent scientific problem
solving tool, it also encourages looking at the world in stark black
and white terms: if it’s not friend, it must be foe. When you come up
with an answer or idea using valid logic, you start believing that
contradictory answers or ideas are wrong by definition, which is useful
in mathematics, but dangerous in dealing with complex human values and
situations. People believe a lot of contradictory things. Also, ideas
that seemed valid in the past sometimes stop serving us but are
difficult to challenge or change. Thus, nuclear weapons aren’t really
a ‘new’ idea, for example: they’re just the problematic modern
byproduct of a very old idea: make your weapons as powerful as
possible, which wasn’t so complicated when we were perfecting better
stone spears. Similarly, with the majority of the world’s scientists
pointing at signs of climate change, a ten and a half million square
mile hole in the ozone layer, smog a major public health issue, and a
finite supply of fossil fuels for us to work with, governments are
still bending over backwards to make it easier for lone SUV owners to
guzzle gas on our roads. The civic government where I live is
investing heavily in new roads while starving public transit, and the
fact that Iraq is sitting on the world’s second largest oil reserves
cannot have escaped the attention of pentagon invasion planners. What
kind of difference might it make if even one tenth of the dollars
budgeted for a war on Iraq were diverted to research into
alternate-fuel automobiles and higher fuel efficiency standards, so we
could be less involved with the oil producing part of the world and
wash our hands of its intolerances and issues? How many fewer wacko
terrorists would line up to die bloodying the nose of ‘the great white
Satan’ if we provided the entire world with clean drinking water and
sufficient food, at a dollar cost well below ten percent of the U.S.
defense budget? Po a tenth of the $214 billion spent on the war on
drugs in the last eight years, mostly to double the total number of
inmates in U.S. prisons with cannabis users charged for possession
under an ounce, had instead been spent on public education?
I can’t say what exactly would change if our governments looked at the
world that way, any more than I can guarantee G-prime would have saved
the holocaust Jews. I’m not always convinced that humanity is
sufficiently evolved to live in a kinder, gentler way, but as a parent,
I can hope. Hope springs eternal. Maybe a few more sombunalls and pos
in the collective consciousness could spark advancements in human
relations and culture to rival technology’s leaps. And if not, on a
wholly selfish-gene level, I want my own offspring to have every
advantage they can on the lifelong playing field. If playing word
games can help them become even a bit more creative, better problem
solvers, or more adaptable than the kids on the next block, sign me up.
Word!
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Michael Nabert is a Canadian writer who loves to talk and sing, and writes mainly about
parenting, the art of wooing and paleontology. Widely traveled, with an opinion about everything, his friends often describe him as having
"a
deplorable excess of character." He is currently stay-at-home dad to Hugh
(3) and Keefe (9). Send feedback for Michael to: poprocks@austinmama.com
