Words, Words, Words

 From Andrew Klavan at New Jerusalem:

My Daily Wire colleague Matt Walsh scored a well-deserved success with his comic documentary What is a Woman? Matt traveled from place to place asking the title question of expert, activist, and passerby alike. The respondents’ embarrassing inability to answer him was a sad and hilarious commentary on how transgender ideology has poisoned our culture. But the sorrow and hilarity of the film did not derive from the fact that there is an answer to the question What is a woman? They arose from the fact that we don’t need an answer. We simply know.

Of course, you can construct material definitions for the word sibling or woman or mother. A sibling is the offspring of your same mother; a mother is a woman who has carried or is carrying a child; a woman is an adult human who, when physically complete and healthy, has the potential to become a mother. But these definitions do not really tell you what these people are any more than a material definition of a Lamborghini tells you what it is like to drive one. Primary words like sibling, mother, woman convey not just a set of biological facts but an entire relational reality that is an essential part of our inner lives.

The post-modern idea that words do not adhere to these meanings is nonsense. The late hipster comedian George Carlin had a famous routine called “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.” In it, he repeated a string of obscenities over and over to make the point that the prohibition against them was irrational. It’s a funny routine, but misguided. Just as I can say the words pine tree and communicate the idea of a pine tree, I can use a four-letter word to convey a materialist dehumanization of the act of love. This is why wise women don’t curse. They pay a far greater price for dehumanizing the body than men do and therefore have a far greater investment in preventing it. Think about the modern prevalence of foul-mouthed females and then think about the podcast Whatever, where foolish women defend their right to degrade themselves sexually. These two phenomena are not unrelated.

Now obviously human reality is not God’s reality, and so our experience is somewhat fluid. Some truths are variable. They are of their culture and of their time. What is becoming modesty in a woman may be different in New York than it is in Abu Dhabi. But there are greater truths that are true always. Modesty in a woman is a virtue because of the essential relational experience of being women and men. (Read more.)

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