Thy sons know not what they say

As you move about your busy day, spare a thought for this country’s most literal-minded citizens, whose triumph in rewriting the national anthem we celebrate today. For what a strange, frightening world they inhabit.

Bad enough that a line of poetry written a hundred years ago should use “all thy sons” to mean “all of us.” But everywhere they are surrounded by people using words and phrases to mean something other than their most direct and literal definition.

How, I wonder, do they cope? When they happen across a group of girls addressing each other as “you guys,” do they stop to correct them? Are they not obliged to point out that a “guy” is usually defined as a man, and as such these young girls are negating their own existence?

When they see the phrase “all hands on deck,” do they wonder why a captain would not simply say “sailors?” And why use such a clearly nautical reference in ordinary conversation, when what is meant is “we need everyone’s participation?”

Synecdoche, the use of the part to stand for the whole, clearly eludes them, as must metaphor, irony and allegory.

That a word or phrase might not only be intended to be understood in a way other than its most obvious and literal sense, but might be broadly understood in that same way, must be a mystery to them, as must the notion that a word’s commonly understood meaning might change over time. There is one meaning, rather, in all times and all places.

How bewildered, then, they must have been to see the gold medal-winning women’s hockey team at the Olympics, belting out the anthem with such unalloyed enthusiasm, problem passage and all. Could these women not understand how they were marginalizing themselves?

What on earth would they make of the woman at a protest rally in defence of the B.C. salmon fishery, who bellowed into the microphone, to general approval, “I’m a fisherman, and goddamn it my daughter’s going to be a fisherman as well!” Or the women’s basketball coach who told Sports Illustrated “we play a man-to-man defence: person to person sounds like a phone call.”

But “son does not mean daughter.” No, it doesn’t, in conventional usage. But there is a context for everything, and the same word often takes on different meanings, depending on the context. Men are not boys and women are not girls, but men will sometimes be called boys and women girls. Sometimes the context is such as to make it offensive (“come here, boy”); sometimes it is convivial (“we’re having a girls’ night out”). But the meaning is always clear.

Well, of course they understand this, just as I’m sure they know that “all thy sons” is neither intended nor commonly understood to mean “only thy sons.” Their literal-mindedness is for the most part a pose.

Some of the most ardent supporters of rewriting the anthem, after all, would be found among those students of deconstructionist literary criticism for whom words have no identifiable meaning as such. For that matter, they are equally likely to be fond of replacing words in common usage with newly coined euphemisms: a word or phrase that means something other than it seems, though not with the intent of clarifying meaning, as a metaphor might, but obscuring it.

This is not as contradictory as it sounds. And here we come to the crux of the issue. If you are of the school that believes words have no meaning but what we give them, as they are passed about in common usage — that the same word or phrase can mean different things at different times, but always and only because both the speaker and the listener have a common understanding of its meaning — then you will tend to see language as something that does not belong to any of us, but to all of us. That is, you will see it as one of those social institutions that is “of man but not by him,” arising not out of any central direction or design but the common needs of the common people.

But there is another school, which sees language not as a common heritage but as an instrument by which one group oppresses another, in the relentless war of all against all that is society. If language may be used to oppress, therefore, it may also be used to liberate, in the service of which it may be necessary to discard such illusions as common usage or plainly understood meanings. And so where the first group might tend to see changes in social attitudes as informing changes in how words are used, to the second this is quite incomprehensible. To effect social change it is essential first to alter the words people use.

And yet there are any number of examples of the former, and precious few of the latter. Take the ridiculous faux-controversy from some years back over “Merry Christmas.” There perhaps was a time when the phrase had an explicitly Christian meaning — back when, as Colby Cosh has written, it still occurred to people to wonder publicly whether the “true meaning of Christmas” was being lost amid all the glitz and commercialism. But today, a festival that was always three-quarters pagan has been pretty much wholly secularized. To wish someone a Merry Christmas nowadays is not to say “devote thee well to the adoration of the Christ Child,” but “have a nice, relaxing time with your family, if humanly possible.”

The words are the same, but the meaning changed. What a concept.

THE WORDS ARE THE SAME, BUT THE MEANING CHANGED.