Solid: The language we use

Saturday 7/20/24

The other day a friend texted me to say that someone who works for them was in a bad car crash and was barely hanging on. They added that they were a great guy, the best.

I missed the text and didn't see it for a day, which is unusual. Very few people text me. Fewer phone me. I've always been candid about how alone I am and why that is.

I talked to this person before I saw the text, and they told me that they were surprised that the guy, who is our age, was driving drunk and that his nephew who was the passenger in the car might die, too.

I have little sympathy for drunk drivers. If they were taken behind the woodshed and put down, I wouldn't have a huge problem with it. You don't get to take other people's lives into your own hands. My friend has daughters. This guy could have killed them. After I get my house back, I don't want to be coming home one night and get killed by a drunk driver when I have so much to live for and so much to give the world.

My friend wasn't saying, "I can't believe someone our age would act this way" in a literal sense. People of all ages drive drunk. The sixteen-year-old, the eighty-two-year-old, the fifty-year-old, whatever it may be. They understand that. But my friend was saying something they don't mean.

After the accident, my friend was getting updates from the man's girlfriend--until he wasn't. Because during all of this, the girlfriend learned that the man had been cheating on her.

And there I was looking at that text I had missed about what a great guy this was.

I asked my friend why he'd just say something like that and if he thought he was a good judge of character.

He said, quite reasonably, that he'd never had any problems with the man at work, he showed up on time (note how low our threshold for goodness is), and once when my friend was locked out of somewhere, this guy drove forty-five minutes and let him in with a spare key he had.

I said that terrible people do decent things. David Remnick, for instance, is a terrible human being. But I bet at least once in his lifetime he did something that was decent. Maybe once he helped an older woman cross the street in the rain. But doing something decent doesn't make you decent. There's more to it than that. Everyone, for the most part, does something decent at some time or other, even if they don't want to, and even if that's the last way they truly are.

I was married to someone who was what she was. What that was is covered elsewhere and it will be gone into in depth later in another medium that is not this one. And one day we were driving up on Cape Ann, where my house is that I am trying to get back and where I'd not like to be killed by a drunk driver on the road hugging the shore someday, and there was a dog in the middle of the busy road we were on.

We stopped, managed to get the dog into the car, and spent the day trying to get it where it needed to be so that its owner would be able to come and get it. The dog hadn't eaten in a while, had been in the woods. And we did that, going from the police station to a shelter that wouldn't admit the dog, to the next town over to try another one.

Then, later, we checked in to make sure the owner did come and the dog was okay. And the owner had and the dog was.

But I've never known or known of a worse person than the person I was with. Speaking of errors in character assessment. But that was then, and that was not me as I am now.

I asked my friend the questions I did because we are just far too casual and lazy with language and labels. The idea of simply terming someone a good person without knowing and knowing them very well, is, to me, crazy. The very idea of saying something I don't mean and mean deeply is crazy to me. For me, it's inconceivable that I would do that.

The other day this friend looked at a book proposal of mine. Unfortunately, it's probably going to end up in these pages, first on its own, and then in link form inside of another entry that will be something exceedingly unpleasant.

They texted me that it was "solid." It was not. "Solid" was not an accurate description. I said a few quick words to that extent, and my friend remarked, "Obviously by solid I don't mean solid. It's brilliant, it's beyond genius, and this would be a masterpiece and it's obvious how amazing this book would be."

So why say "solid" if that is not what you mean? Is it shorthand for those other things? Code? I have to convert? I'm meant to multiply? Why not just say what you mean?

Words are precious because meaning--actual meaning--is paramount. Essence. Truth. Not vagaries and surrounding things, not saying something to say it, not saying things about that which we have not examined or thought about.

Saying what we mean, as best and honestly as we can, is a sign of respect for life, for ourselves, and for others. We care enough about all three to try the best we can to get things right.

And it's not like there's some big time saver between saying, "He's the best guy ever" or what not and "He just works for me, but I've never had any problems with him."

Which is really what my friend meant.

You see, I want to take you seriously. No matter who you are. And for me to take you seriously, I have to take your words seriously. When my friend says to me that this other guy is a great guy, I'm thinking that my friend is endorsing him as some moral paragon, and a serious person who is worth taking seriously wouldn't do that lightly or without cause.

You have to try and get things right. It's part of trying to do your best. Doing our best doesn't necessarily involve more effort or time. It certainly can. But what it always does involve is care and awareness. Our words matter so much. They're not separate from us. We're not this thing over here and these words are over there and aren't really applicable to the person front and center.

They say a lot about us, the care we take or don't, where we're at in our growth, our maturity, our wisdom, our awareness of what's important, our values, the respect we have for ourselves and for others. Our desire to be taken seriously.

And you should desire that. You're not some joke. Or you shouldn't be. You should give people cause to respect you and take you seriously. And a big part of that is what you say, how you say it, why you say it. We communicate in various ways, but no more so than with words, with the language we use and that we choose to use--because it is up to us. The language you use is ultimately a choice. It's the selection of a way of being. And it says much.