War and Words

"And so the war had come down to words. It was fought now in terminology across a table. It was contested in sentences. Entrenchments and assaults, drum taps and bugle calls, marches, ambushes, burnings, and pitched battles were transmogrified into nouns and verbs....Language is war by other means." --The March E.L. Doctorow

The "War in Heaven" was first described to me as a war of words. I pictured a drawn-out argument between reasonable intellectuals and whiny dissenters. In my child's mind I imagined a fight similar to those I initiated with my siblings. Not quite.

Language translates our thoughts. It is an attempt to communicate who we are, our culture, our motivations and desires to others. Language (or the lack of it) determines what war will be. In the end, wars are mapped onto history by treaties, journals, and memories. The language preserves the war, the language finishes the war.

I guess that could mean that each conversation balances between war and reconciliation. Will we master language to attain understanding? Each word is a potential weapon or shield, each word an opportunity for peace. Has the world ever been at peace? I know it only in pieces. Perhaps countries and cultures will find a way to unite in language (not necessarily a shared one) through individual willingness to embrace the potential of terminology--to see a two-edged sword as something other than a tool for destruction.