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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Canon Rachel Mann

Good morning.

It should come as no surprise that, as a poet, I’m obsessed with words. They are beautiful and tricksy things which can be used to inspire and to wound. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, ‘uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.’

I am fascinated by how a word’s meaning can change over time. Consider the word ‘nice’. Down the centuries its meaning has shifted several times. In the Middle Ages, it meant ‘silly’, but by the early modern period it had come to mean fastidious. In the eighteenth century, its meaning shifted again, from ‘precise’ to ‘agreeable’ or ‘pretty’. The change was so noteworthy that, in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney teases Catherine Morland for using the new fashionable sense of the word.

In our own time, I’m amazed by how rapidly the word ‘woke’ has shifted from its initial use. The term emerged in African-American culture meaning ‘alert to racial prejudice and discrimination’. About ten years ago, this meaning expanded positively to include awareness of sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Now, as far as I can see, it is used as a catch-all negative term to dismiss anyone who is progressive or inclusive.

Whatever one might think about these shifts in meaning, they remind us that language is never static and can be used for any number of purposes, good and bad. Samuel Butler said, ‘Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we’ve got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst.’

Holy God, help us this day to use words to speak truth and model love; to build up rather than to tear down, and to seek all that makes for peace.

Amen