One could be forgiven for thinking that the title of this blog post sounds like a transcript to a bewildering game of word association. I wish it were.

In my first post, Metaphor, metaphor! Wherefore art thou, Metaphor? I discussed the penchant of psychology and cognitive science (which includes philosophy and linguistics) to pay more attention (both in terms of their research output and theoretical emphasis) to literal language, at the expense of the more poetic features of the human mind. Indeed the study of poetry, metaphors, and creativity is a negligible portion of the above fields, much to the dismay of those who in fact study it. In the second post, When AT&T asked us to ‘Reach out and touch someone’, did they mean that literally? I discussed the nature of a specific metaphor (‘touch’) with respect to technology and human social psychology, in hopes of giving a ‘tangible’ example of the ubiquity of metaphor in our language and what it can reveal were one willing to ‘embrace’ the importance of its closer inspection.

The subtitle to my Psychology Today blog is “What our language reveals about how we think and who we are”. I pointed out in the last post that language reveals the fundamental social nature of human beings. In a sense, this post is an extension of that idea.

Language fulfills a promise, in which we all commit to certain words meaning certain things. When I hear English, for example, there is something about it that unites me to a person such that if I were told to “Go bleep myself” by that person, I would be offended, but only to the extent that I knew the language being spoken was a language (called English) and the nature of said bleeping—and what it could do to me should I undertake such bleeping myself, as instructed. Language reveals our social bonds and how they are susceptible to breaking, as well as giving us the lessons of those feelings of loss when we are betrayed or insulted. Words are powerful, but only inasmuch as they are part of something bigger.

Indeed, for all I know, last night when I walked down the block to throw away the garbage, every cricket could have been mocking me and my shorts, telling me to “Go bleep myself”. Thankfully, their ‘language’ does not instill in me an inter-species bond in need of recognition and so I felt no friendship or prospect of loss, irrespective of whether or not their chirps were mocking me.

The real-life inspiration for revisiting the social nature of language in this post was unexpectedly and disappointingly available this past week as an example of when a community of speakers breaks down and the poisonous and tragic consequences that follow such a breach of trust. Consider the following, from the July 7, 2008 City Hall blog, providing a recap of a special meeting of county commissioners (original source available here):

A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.

County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.

Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections "has become a black hole" because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud "Excuse me!" He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a "white hole."

That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.

Mayfield shot back that it was a figure of speech and a science term. A black hole, according to Webster's, is perhaps "the invisible remains of a collapsed star, with an intense gravitational field from which neither light nor matter can escape."

Other county officials quickly interceded to break it up and get the meeting back on track. TV news cameras were rolling, after all.

Video of the exchange can be found here.

The first time I read this, I took Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield’s appeal that a black hole was “a figure of speech and a science term” to be a sort of flailing apology. I thought: It’s a science term, end of story; there was no figure of speech to be misunderstood. There is no need for an apology. It actually didn’t dawn on me right away that the scientific term “black hole” was quite obviously named in a figurative way when coined. What caught me off-guard was that someone in 2008 took black-ness and hole-ness figuratively in order to create something negative, something racially insensitive and incendiary, when I read the term as quite ‘literal’, in that it had a technical, official scientific meaning. Why would someone opt for a more 'poetic' construction?

When a speaker in a linguistic community can no longer trust the bonds formed by sharing a set of words with another speaker, they both begin to speak different languages and begin to become different peoples.

So what does this example of our language reveal about how we think and who we are as a people? It underscores the power of language, first of all—its lure and potency and how one can get unwittingly lost in that world of arbitrary symbols and sounds and forget the world of flesh-and-bone people. But it reminds me of a lesson from Martin Luther King, Jr., (paraphrasing): Let us not judge a person by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Let us not also get lost in unfounded interpretations of words that serve only to divide. I don’t know Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, but there would seem to be no reason to judge his words ill-of-character and certainly no reason to judge him by the colors he uses in his words or for someone with a different skin color to see the worst possibilities in his words.

(Race, language, and black holes was prompted originally by Eric Berger’s science blog at the Houston Chronicle, and I am thankful he chose to report this incident, though I am discouraged that what he reported even occurred.)