When I was three or four, it’s possible God invented the letter “s” to test me. I lisped, which I personally find adorable, but in Italian Catholic households of the sixties, lisping had all the endearing bonafides of a certain sibilant snake of a particular garden variety.
So I learned to train the tip of my tongue on my lower gumline before every “s.” Before long, I’d un-lisped.
Words play a defining role in my life, for a number of reasons, chief among them that I write and translate for a living.
I’m around words literally all the time, which is why I can tell you with blush-inducing confidence that they matter. Words are how we understand the world, make sense of it, name and unlock its multiple wonders. They are the custodians of meaning, and as such, the alpha and beta blocks of the meaningful life, for interweaving and interchanging, interspersing and intersecting, interplaying and interpreting so we may exercise our birthright to hold more than one idea.
There is a silent majority out there tired of keeping its head down out of civility while blinkered minorities obsequiously switch on the outrage to evangelize reductivism, spread negotiable truths, normalize cynicism, practice epistemic hoodwinking to allow doubt to proliferate and chafe against our humanity.
Equally debilitating narratives are being spun on the other side of the sociocultural divide by the zealots of anomie, the spineless pretend adults hooked on self-love because living accountably is hard, the dealers and pushers of moral gruel because moral imperatives are too big an ask, lapsed humans incapacitating the human impulse to cope.
The time is for speaking up so young and future generations know to keep their chins up — know our legacy to them, the legacy of the reasonable majority, is hope. It’s how we say there’s a way to be in the world, and it’s not flatlining on our watch.
Lately, I often catch myself wanting to un-silence my lisp. Nostalgia, perhaps, for when we didn’t demonize knowing and thinking? Resistance in the face of a nihilistic knowledge hierarchy that pins the well-informed at the bottom? My own insurrectionist Rosebud?…
Here is where I get to punch the air with every “s” I type, where I get to slip wordcounts and deadlines in the drawer, step away from performing “a ballet in a phone booth,” as Pulitzer writer Russel Baker famously put it, and let the keys rip.
For why type on your tippy toes when the internet gifts you a ballroom?
