The Importance of Language

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Her_Movie_Poster

Anyone who is a fan of repartee and delicious dialogue is going to love HER, playing in theaters everywhere.  The movie explores our most basic human need to connect in order to belong.  HER explores the question of “How do you share your life with another?” Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with his operating system Samantha (Voice Over by Scarlett Johansson) in a futuristic, yet feasible vision of our own present infidelity with technology.  The movie explores the human experience of breakups, letting go, sexual pleasure, and emotional attachment through Oscar winning dialogue to covet.  Alienation Syndrome is an actual diagnosis for which the treatment is language.  HER is a movie which richly displays the beauty of language as an interpersonal art form.

Many people today fear the communication process because of more or less normal fears of involving themselves deeply with others.  Some fail to pour themselves into their language nor expect others to do so.  Language must remain on a safe level for these people, void of any adventure.  They habitually put filters between what they really think and feel and what they actually say.  The result is communication that is often muddied, but safe.

Some people engage in language that is overly precise, asking too much of language, while others engage in language that is too vague, asking too little.  Both extremes are usually defensive maneuvers designed to keep interpersonal contacts at acceptable levels.

SamanthaIn either case, the poverty of expression results in patterns of language that prohibit the speaker from expressing what they would like to say.  Language rather than being full and alive is conversationally anemic.

Yet despite the problems with language, language is an instrument by which we examine the world around us.  If we are afraid of this world, our language will be circumscribed and feeble, but if we love the world and are challenged by it, then our language will be strong and searching.  The limits of a person’s language become the limits of their world.

The best that life has to offer invites you to experiment with the wonderful potential of language.  Identify the roadblocks to effective and lively communication.  Language is sometimes a sensitive instrument and at other times a clumsy tool of communication.  Yet, irrespective of the challenge, when we endeavor to enlarge the possibilities of our language, we enlarge our personal possibilities.

A child learning to speak is acquiring one of the prime functions supporting a sense of individual autonomy and one of the prime techniques for expanding the radius of “give and take”.  Speech defines us.  Our language becomes one of the early ways in which we declare ourselves separate and distinct, and not just an appendage of our parents, church, school or family, but a person in our own right.   I am defined by my use of language.  Through language I make myself who, and what I am.

It may be counterintuitive, but I want you to introduce him to HER!