I find language fascinating and flummoxing (now there’s a word you don’t encounter everyday). French, which I can use stumblingly, is sometimes called “la langue des anges”—the angels’ tongue—and not just by the French. A Finnish friend told me his language will be the language of Heaven because it takes an eternity to learn.
My mother tongue is English. Yet
a recent trip to the UK reminded me that English isn’t the same everywhere. As George Bernard Shaw put it, “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.” I once came on a roadside sign in Scotland that read “Roadway Liable to Subsidence”! In the Canadian Rockies we’d say “Caution--Soft Shoulder.
If I were asked out of the blue, I would probably say language is the primary tool of communication. But it is so much more, isn’t it?
- Sometimes it’s a tool of intimidation (think of the fine print in contracts);
- Sometimes it’s a sign of status (I once saw adjacent bathroom doors—one marked “women,” the other “ladies”).
- Sometimes the sound of the word reinforces its meaning (like “splat”);
- Sometimes sound contradicts sense (“eleemosynary” sounds very ungenerous to me).
In that vein, I think that if the Good News of Jesus is to be received as good news it has got to be heard in tones which the hearer finds inviting.
I thought of that again this morning as I was reading Henry Hitchings’s 'The Secret Life of Words'. I had not known that the Normans brought the word “charity” into English in the twelfth century. Now, charity is a nice-enough-sounding word, I suppose, for a very important virtue; but Hitchings tells me it replaced an older Anglo-Saxon word that I immediately wished we still had: “mildheortnes.” Isn’t that a great word? To be mild-hearted...or better still, to be on the receiving end of mild-heartedness...now, that is Good News indeed.
“And now faith, hope and mild-heortnes abide, these three; and the greatest of these is mild-heortnes.” (1 Corinthians 13:13, New Revised Standard Version, further revised)