Keeping Our Heads in the Language Game: On Political Talk, King, and Obama [2011]

The linkage of language and public deliberation has been a key connection in my career as I have been greatly absorbed with the project of how best to interpret language in the public sphere, how to examine its effects relative to educational and social equity, how to produce it, how to help students wield language skillfully both in production terms and in hermeneutic terms. In other words, the function and force of language in society has been as important a topic to me as any other. We all probably remember this childhood ditty: “Sticks and stones may break my bones/But words will never hurt me.” As I have often remarked, the only reason to assert this claim, a contention that is patently false, is because the potency of language to damage has been recognized by the speaker. The defiant words are an attempt to protect the psyche through the mechanism of denial. Consider an alternate riff that goes like this: “Words may hurt me/But sticks and stones will never break my bones.” We would clearly see the fallacy there and understand the utterance as a somewhat Spartan refusal to acknowledge the vulnerability of the flesh. So we would not be fooled, nor have we ever really been fooled, by the phrase “but words will never hurt me” even as we may have said those words in a battle for psychic comfort.