In 2024, it's vital we examine the way we think about language

Understanding the fallibility of language could be the revolutionary act we need

We are born into language – and it’s one of touch, gestures, sensation. From birth, a baby learns the language of their environment through a series of cues, by testing actions and response. They arrive with their own language too – different pitches of screams, movements, coos. There are entire manuals to help parents to decode this, because even bilingual intellectuals can be left on the edge of sanity if they’re unable to discern what a fretful baby wants to convey.

A baby learns by mirroring, and well before their first birthday they usually understand that parents are emitting a complex array of sounds to communicate with them. They will therefore try out their first words, wallowing in the joy and admiration they receive for their efforts, which will compel them to quickly learn more. Verbal language begins to take precedence. Slowly, thankfully, as it does, the screeching and tantrums begin to subside.

Humans have thrived because we learned to cooperate and communicate. And we did so because we gained, through evolution, complex brains with an intricate and highly effective language system. When this works well, we can have conversations so sophisticated that they result in people landing on the moon or cures for diseases. When linguistic communication isn’t effective, we become so frustrated that we resort to myriad versions of violence, individually and collectively. So now, if we are to thrive with the perpetuity of 24/7 Internet communication and the onset of AI, we need, more than ever, to have urgent conversations around the limits and inadequacies of our language. Because what if language, and the way we use it, is essentially flawed? How else can we be making such incredible progress in the fields of medicine and technology, whilst ignoring irrefutable evidence that our natural world is sinking into an irreversible decline? How else can we be squabbling endlessly online, to a global backdrop of bombs and carnage and lives degraded to nothing? Perhaps the words are there for us, and we don’t know how to use or interpret them; or perhaps language itself is inadequate for the moment.

When I wrote The Hush, I was frustrated by the fact that the vital ideas around feminism had been taken over and fractured because of the fallibility of language, which can be turned around and weaponised to undermine itself. Many older women no longer wanted to assert themselves as feminists – i.e. simply naming their essential belief in equality – scared they would be seen as angry man-haters. Swathes of younger women derided the idea of feminism – becoming anti-feminist, talking online about why feminism sucks. The degradation of feminism has had burgeoning, terrifying legislative consequences in the US (with the overturning of abortion protections from Roe v Wade) and China (where the government has called for women to return to the home) and undermined progress on a global scale. For all women, a collective, vital sense of autonomy has been confused and derided by semantics. That’s why, in The Hush, I chose to depict my mother and daughter characters communicating without words at key moments in the story. And ever since I began to study the limits and complexities around language I’ve become more interested in this theme and the need to discuss it.

I recently read Naomi Alderman’s compelling and thought-provoking novel, The Future, and found a description of one of the characters recognising this too:

And in that moment there was no need for words. There were no more names for anything. She was there as you are there.

Wherever you are, the richness and complexity and inexhaustible, unplumbable thereness of the whole rushes in through your eyes and your ears and your nose and across your skin. Every single thing around you is right there and so are you. The teeming world is right there, and all of it is neither good nor bad, it just is.

It is not possible to express this with symbols. All that the symbols can ever be is a flag in the sand pointing at where to dig. You have found the treasure. It is the world as it is.

The chapter finishes with the sentence: All the words went away.

Individually, sometimes, we can make the words go away. We can try meditation to consciously shift our minds into a place beyond language, temporarily bypassing the endless linguistic tussle of our internal monologue. Occasionally, we experience moments so all-encompassing that we forget about language as we become immersed in sensation. But these are temporary conditions, and, collectively, we cannot regress. Words aren’t going anywhere – in fact, we’re bombarded by them with an exponential intensity, and we all have the opportunity to make ourselves heard like never before. So isn’t it vital that we learn how to step back from the vortex of language and its usage, to see its falsehoods and frailties, and to have more conversations about the ways in which words might fail us. If we want to harness the power of language and understand its constantly evolving complexity, we must communicate with full awareness that everything we write and say is filtered through the biased lenses we hold up to our lives. And that our words will always be evaluated by others and be vulnerable to misinterpretation and misuse. As someone who has committed to a life working with words and is forever dazzled by their beauty and possibility, this isn’t a suggestion that we devalue our relationship with language: we just have to improve our understanding of how it works and constructs who we are. Then we can decide how we might better use our words as gifts, to get where we want to go.