Why teachers may have accidentally made us devalue and more vulnerable to the power of words used in media.

You know why I rarely forgot to bring my gym shorts to gym class?

Because if I did,  my phys ed teacher, Mr. Creath, would make me write a page from the dictionary as punishment. You’d think, I’d learn all the spelling and meanings under all the words around aardvark from having to do that.  Instead what I almost ended up doing is learning to hate the English language.

If you think about it, it’s essentially the scene from A Clockwork Orange. Okay, I’m not strapped to a chair with prongs forcing my eyes open listening to Beethoven, but like that character, I am being forced to build a Pavolovian aversion to words. Given as punishment, words = punishment.

I got that punishment from different teachers. Wrote more than a few “I will nots…” on classroom chalkboards than I wanted. And since Bart Simpson does it in the opening credits of the Simpsons every week, I can’t be the only one to get the message. Words bring pain, displeasure and are not socially valued.

If that’s the attitude about words. Why on earth would students learn to respect words for more than delivering pain? They, like I almost did, dismiss them as “stupid words” and become blind to their power to inspire, inform and deceive.  That’s a bit like thinking a nuclear fuel rod is just a hard, metal stick.

This mindset can leave students, unarmed and underestimating a person or an organization (like marketing firms, political organizations, etc.) with a respect and a command of words to bend and twist them around a less respecting mind. Linguistic mavens who know how to balance a chosen word that implies an idea we want to believe more than actually asserts that idea.

All because of a gym teacher that wanted to teach me a lesson about bringing gym shorts to class? Of course loss of love of words wasn’t the intended result. But the punishment was given with the assumption and communication that words are punishment.

Words are indeed important. I talk about how words are used by linguistic and rhetorical mavens in my book Does This News Make Me Look Fat?  Go to Amazon to buy or read the first chapter at www.junkfoodmedianation.com