Verbalizing Reality
As we gird ourselves for the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States tomorrow, it’s worth revisiting the role of language in our daily lives. Language doesn't simply describe reality but actively shapes how we perceive, understand, and communicate our experiences, a thesis easily demonstrated through everyday examples of how words fundamentally alter meaning, understanding, and the world.
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When someone says "it's hot outside," this simple statement exemplifies how language mediates physical reality. What counts as "hot" depends on where you live, the season, and what you're used to. A Minnesotan might call 75°F "hot" while someone from Phoenix might consider that quite pleasant.
The word "hot" doesn't describe an objective temperature. It carries with it a whole framework for evaluating thermal experience. Someone calling it "hot" is already interpreting their sensory experience through their linguistic and cultural understanding of temperature, comfort, and what constitutes normal versus extreme weather.
This mediation filters how they communicate about the temperature grounded in their actual experience of it whether they feel uncomfortable, whether they change their plans, how they dress, etc. The language available to them to conceptualize and respond to temperature is part of how they experience the temperature itself.
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A reporter covering a local school board meeting has three hours of contentious debate but only 400 words—133 and 1/3 words per hour. As she writes her notes, her word choices determine what emerges as "newsworthy.” Do parents “raise concerns" or “clash over”? Her word choices compress and in the process actively shape what version of reality reaches readers.
A novelist writing a pivotal scene works through drafts. In early versions she includes every gesture, every thought. Then she begins filtering, not just cutting, but seeking words that carry multiple tensions. "His hand settled on the doorknob" replaces a whole paragraph—hesitation, anger, the desire to leave. The compression itself changes meaning.
A technical writer revising documentation for software decides to frame features as "security measures" rather than "user controls." This choice filters how readers and eventually users conceptualize their relationship with the software. Are they being protected or empowered? A phrase shapes how people interact with the interface. A whole sentence can change everything.
An obituary writer starts with basic facts about the deceased but wrestles with shaping their legacy through specific anecdotes. She knows that "devoted father" is expected, but when she writes "he kept a running list of his children's favorite jokes,” this precise detail shapes not just readers' understanding but the family's own crystallizing memories of their father.
A poet drafts a verse about anxiety but avoids ever naming it directly. Instead, she shapes understanding through imagery: "morning light catches dust motes/each an accusation." The image transforms morning light and the air we breathe into anxiety and reshapes how readers might experience their own moments of angst. The morning sun welcomes us to a new day of dust motes.
A speech writer working on a CEO's layoff announcement consciously shapes employee understanding through active versus passive construction. "Market conditions have forced difficult decisions" versus "We are choosing to restructure" defines different narratives about agency, responsibility and inevitability. The selected syntax communicates the central fact but also changes how the event is processed and remembered within company culture.
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Subjects, verbs, and objects organize experience into structures that can become reality. Modifiers tint or remix meanings to revise experiences that color reality. Like light through a prism, an either or an or splits or diffracts experience into components and forces a choice of reality. A both and an and refracts or bends perceptions and can revise the world.
Language masquerades as a child, innocent, sugar and spice, grammar and syntax, a transparent device we use to achieve a meeting of the minds. You believe what I say is what I think, but what I say can be no more than what I reveal, like the iceberg principle.
To make communication even more miraculous, the typical person for whom language isn’t all that interesting, who grows testy when an interlocutor starts dancing on the head of a pin, when a disagreement is “just semantics, not real,” that typical person takes in the words of another and automatically translates them into their own words. Go figure.
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Language, then, is a rickety bridge across the divide between minds. Unlike physical bridges, however, this makeshift bridge must be built anew with each new crossing. It’s no wonder language bots are sometimes driven to hallucinate. So are humans.
Every word choice, each grammatical construction, each careful compression of meaning doesn't transmit reality—it participates in creating it. This process occurs not just in the carefully constructed words of writers and poets, but in every conversation, in every casual exchange, in every attempt to translate experience into words.
We are all, in our daily use of language, participating in the continuous act of world-building. Be careful how you read the words of a robot. Be careful what you say. Be careful when you listen. In the act of languaging, in a word, we construct reality.
Agreed, and appreciative of somewhat of your applied contemporary editorial in the echoes of Orwell and Politics of the English Language. Another approach is also to acknowledge challenge but stay as poets have since a very long time ago, working in the particular and then seeing ourselves in at least one more person, or maybe two, or maybe more. Not poetry of ego and bluster, clever word choices that lead to reducing or scapegoating others, but the types of poems that acknowledge we have those desires for power and honor, but we don't grow well when we grow through power and honor alone.
I'm not girding myself at all though for the inauguration today. I have people in my life who are celebrating the inauguration today, joyfully, and those people have loved me well in my personal life and others have treated me with respect professionally. I have others that are girding, and others aggravated, exhausted, fearful, or detached. It's maybe a story best told right here in Western PA - where I teach in Western PA, the poetry and rhetoric of the Trump campaign in 2015, in places like Ambridge and further east, Johnstown, and in the neighborhoods of this suburban district in Pittsburgh, Trump's campaign spoke words that were often heard with hope and simple rightness in his town halls for Pennsylvanians - words that touched people that only saw themselves as outside of other's hope, to start. His campaign resonated with people because he more often spoke to their needs as well as their frustrations, and other campaigns lost touch or thought they knew what people wanted without listening really well or more transparently engaging with viewpoints other campaigns offered that didn't fit the day to day life of many people in this area.
My classes have often been split since 2015 in political viewpoints, and in teaching AP Language as well as Journalism, I have to navigate the bias within the College Board materials for the AP course and then legacy and social media for Journalism to make sure my students can wrestle with what is selected and have a fair chance to engage from their honest perspective, and in many ways I welcome that. Isn't that the plurality in the hope of what people imagine America can be? It's hard work - multiple viewpoints, seemingly less in common, etc...but if we're good language teachers, in Language Arts and Media classes, we have so many tools to help people choose their words with care, and then listen with care, or at least try to teach the tools as best we can. When we run into friction within our classes, that's what great poetry and literature and oratory and then multimedia texts answer, and hopefully our own skills as listeners can help our students remain rooted in what we share while we explore, debate, and wrestle through what we don't. We can be fundamentally different, but also surprised that we might also share something outside of lower common denominator affinities in common, and then work from there.
Offloading our word choice to robots makes sense for many people in 2025 when we're stressed, tired, worried, anxious, hopeless, or curious but unwilling to enjoy choosing words with care. Or next, often outside of classrooms, we reasonably see a block ahead to have a self-sufficient career due to automation, or are unable because our livelihood is directly threatened, etc. Or even we have unreasonable worries because we can't even make sense of the pace of changes around us...in many ways, that's the Western PA story in 2025.
But no girding here, at least. If we see language as a gift, not a curse, even when the choices are harsh, then we start to use language better. Learning this as I'm constructing a course on Human Flourishing for the public schools, starting in 7 days. I am 100% using your writing from today sometime soon though, just thinking about audience and how it fits best, and how much. You just let me get to Orwell's argument, thank you! Marvelous stuff.