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Owning our words: Sounding the depths of language

L. M. Sacasas · · ·17 min read
Commentary by Hex Index staff

The Language We're Losing

L. M. Sacasas has written something urgent about language at the moment language machines are reshaping what words mean. The piece arrives as large language models turn human speech into training data, and Sacasas treats this not as a technical problem but as a human one. What does language have to do with human flourishing? That question anchors everything.

Words as Human Fabric

Sacasas opens with Iris Murdoch's warning from "The Idea of Perfection": "Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril." This is not nostalgia. Murdoch wrote before chatbots could mimic human conversation, yet her warning cuts deeper now that language has become raw material for machines.

Owning our words: Sounding the depths of language

As Sacasas puts it, technology cannot be understood merely as a neutral tool. Language machines operate on words as their input, their interface, and their output. The question becomes whether outsourcing articulation erodes our capacity to judge well.

"Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril."

Stewarding the Gift

Sacasas draws on Marilyn Chandler McIntyre's Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies to argue that language requires active care. McIntyre writes, "if language is to retain its power to nourish and sustain our common life, we have to care for it in something like the way good farmers care for the life of the soil." Three prescriptions follow: deepen reading skills, cultivate precise speaking and listening, practice being makers of words.

Sacasas adds a crucial qualifier: delight in metaphor, but only good metaphor. The piece includes J.R.R. Tolkien's sharp refusal of a bad metaphor—"I don't tick. I am not a machine"—as a model of linguistic self-defense.

Language Disintegration

Wendell Berry's "Standing By Words" provides the heaviest weight. Sacasas quotes Berry on two epidemic illnesses: "the disintegration of communities and the disintegration of persons." Berry connects these to language itself: "My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning."

Critics might note that Berry wrote forty years ago about nuclear regulators and print culture. Yet Sacasas argues the disintegration accelerated with specialized professional language. Berry called it "a cheat and a hiding place; it may, indeed, be an ambush." When experts cannot say what they are talking about to their neighbors, public responsibility becomes public relations.

Corruption of the Word

Josef Pieper's "Abuse of Language—Abuse of Power" links linguistic corruption to political corruption. Sacasas quotes Pieper: "if the word becomes corrupted, human existence itself will not remain unaffected and untainted." The abuse of political power finds fertile soil in the sophistic abuse of words.

George Steiner's observation about German language after the Holocaust sharpens the point. Languages can absorb cheapness and hysteria until a breaking point. Something settles in the marrow. The language no longer performs its functions: conveying humane order and communicating the quick of the human spirit.

Critics might argue this framing is too dark for the current moment. Not every degraded phrase leads to tyranny. Yet Sacasas suggests the almost imperceptible moment when words lose dignity matters precisely because it is imperceptible.

Triadic Worlds

Sacasas closes with Rowan Williams drawing on Walker Percy and Charles Pearce: language transforms experience from stimulus-response into a triadic world where symbols stand between minds and objects. This world includes risk of metaphor, possibility of error, possibility of fiction. The human speaker takes the world as a project.

Sacasas writes that we cannot easily imagine human speaking without these risks. That is the point worth keeping.

Bottom Line

Sacasas has assembled fragments that hang together meaningfully around one claim: language machines threaten not just convenience but human fabric. The piece succeeds by refusing to treat technology as neutral. The verdict: read this when you need to remember why words matter more than efficiency.

Deep Dives

Explore these related deep dives:

  • Large language model

    The piece discusses LLMs and chatbots as language machines that operate on language as raw material

Sources

Owning our words: Sounding the depths of language

by L. M. Sacasas · · Read full article

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. I understand both of those terms quite capaciously, which is another way of saying that I tend to write about technology as a way of getting at what I take to be fundamentally human questions. There are many such questions worth pursuing these days, one of which might be expressed this way: What does language have to do with human flourishing? This installment seeks to encourage our thinking about this question through a series of interrelated fragments drawn from a variety of sources. And, of course, such reflection is undertaken in the shadow of the rise of language machines in the form of large language models and their chat interfaces. The fragments can each stand alone and will, I trust, sustain a measure of reflection, but I’ve also attempted to arrange them along an arc so that they hang together meaningfully. In any case, I trust you’ll find something here worth contemplating. Read at your leisure.

Cheers,

Michael

“Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril.”

— Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection”

1. I initially conceived of this post as a relatively brief reflection on the gift of language, and the responsibilities entailed by this gift. As the earliest draft took shape in my mind, these reflections were to be anchored by something the 20th-century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote in a lecture titled “The Idea of Perfection.” “Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them,” Murdoch argued. “The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril.”

This warning has echoed in my mind for some time now, particularly in light of the rise of LLMs and chatbots over the past few years. Whatever else we might say about these technologies and however varied their capabilities, they operate on language as their raw material, language ordinarily constitutes their interface with users, and what they produce in many if not most cases is language. And because one of the foundational principles guiding my thinking is that technology cannot be understood merely as a neutral tool by which we enhance our capacity or secure a measure of convenience, then it seems that ...