Words&Dirt

“‘If you’re the bearer of the knife, you have a task that’s greater than you can imagine.  A child…How could they let it happen?  Well so it must be….There is a war coming, boy.  The greatest war there ever was.  Something like it happened before, and this time the right side must win.  We’ve had nothing but lies and propaganda and cruelty and deceit for all the thousands of years of human history.  It’s time we started again, but properly this time….’

He stopped to take in several rattling breaths.

‘The knife,’ he went on after a minute.  ‘They never knew what they were making, those old philosophers.  They invented a device that could split open the very smallest particles of matter, and they used it to steal candy.  They had no idea that they’d made the one weapon in all the universes that could defeat the tyrant.  The Authority.  God.  The rebel angels fell because they didn’t have anything like the knife; but now…’

‘I didn’t want it!  I don’t want it now!’ Will cried.  ‘If you want it, you can have it!  I hate it, and I hate what it does––’

‘Too late.  You haven’t any choice; you’re the bearer.  It’s picked out for you.  And, what’s more, they know you’ve got it; and if you don’t use it against them, they’ll tear it from your hands and use it against the rest of us, forever and ever.'”

––The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman, loc. 4159-67

“Language is a lever with which we can convey surprising facts, weird new ideas, unwelcome news, and other thoughts that a listener may be unprepared for.  This leverage requires a rigid stick and a solid fulcrum, and that’s what the meaning of a sentence and the words and rules supporting them must be.  If meanings could be freely reinterpreted in context, language would be a wet noodle and not up to the job of forcing new ideas into the minds of listeners.  Even when language is used nonliterally in euphemism, wordplay, subtext, and metaphor––especially when it is used in those ways––it relies on the sparks that fly in a listener’s mind as the literal meaning of a speaker’s words collides with a plausible guess about the speaker’s intent.”

––The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker, pg. 123-4