So, do words matter at all?

This week’s readings made me consider how much the actual words someone speaks — or the content of one’s speech — matters. As the King/Sumner reading demonstrated, our association of words, and therefore our understanding of speech, is heavily influenced by our pre-determined notions about the group or groups to which a speaker belongs. The exemplar resonance model (why “princess” in an English accent makes us think of Kate Middleton but “princess” in an American accent makes us think of Belle) sums up a perhaps predictable but important reality: the way we interpret what is said is not independent of the person saying it. But our tendency to interpret speech differently based on the speaker’s perceived identity is not evenly-distributed for all speaker groups. In other words, some people’s speech patterns lead to more uniform assumptions than others. So if you want someone, or more specifically anyone, to listen to the content of what you have to say, do you have to sound group-less? The Condoleezza Rice reading suggested that dissociation from label-able populations is potentially beneficial: “It is perhaps to Rice’s advantage to project a linguistic and symbolic identity that de-emphasiezes regional marked features.” But if this is in fact the case, how does one establish emotional resonance with their audience? 

So, back to the underlying question: does what we say matter? As someone who often feels I express myself best through writing and speech, the suggestion that it doesn’t — or at least that it might matter less than I imagined — is a bit jarring. In a language as vast and intricate as English, it’s challenging to believe that small semantic differences between near-synonyms aren’t deeply important. But, when listening to a speech, once all the external factors are considered (pre-disposed notions about a speaker, environmental factors, previous associations with the content, distraction . . . ) how much room is there to extrapolate and separate meaning from context? Maybe this is an unnecessary desire, but it’s an interesting one to consider. 

I have a friend who learned almost every grown-up word she knows from studying for the SAT. So, every time she hears someone say a word she learned from a flash-card or every time one of those words shows up in class, she remembers learning it and thinks about the test. Obviously this is an extreme example, but we all learned every word we know in a specific, emotional, warped-by-memory context. What we think about when we think about words isn’t separate from who we are, and therefore who we are — and whom we imagine our speaker to be — isn’t separable from experience, regardless of that experience’s relevance to the words in question.