Is Your Speech Beautiful?
“In the beginning was the Word”
It seems we are in a race to the bottom when it comes to our language. Not only are we becoming ruder as a society, but we are also swearing more and more, encouraged by the growing claim that swearing is actually good for you. Study after study promotes its supposed benefits: from pain-dampening effects to improved physical performance, swearing is considered a sign of both physical fitness and high verbal IQ.
Who could object? Only masochistic, sluggish, low-verbal IQ types, surely.
But how you speak isn’t just a question of personal preference or optimizing performance. Problems of swearing, rudeness, and poor vocabulary share a common root issue: ugly language. And it’s an issue that deserves your attention.
According to thinkers like George Orwell, St. Paul, and the Earl of Chesterfield, beautiful language is one of the most profound ways of shaping yourself, and the world, into what you want them to be. Speaking well isn’t just a question of avoiding vulgarity, but one of actively making your speech an expression of the beautiful.
Today, we look at how language deteriorated, why the decline matters, and how you can bring beauty back to both your speech and your world.
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I Swear It’s a Problem
One reason many don’t want the quality of speech to matter today is that they live in the trampled remains of Chesterton’s fence on this matter. Attitudes towards speech have liberalized since the 1950s, as modern entertainment became more vulgar and cultural commentators began questioning speech codes for media. This happened at the same time as adults’ overall vocabulary skills started to decline, a trend that has held strong since at least the 1970s.
This culture of edgy-cool often uses obscenity as a shortcut to power, emotion or presence. It says “I am very serious, I care intensely about this.” Unfortunately for those people, linguistic inflation is real, which means that when everyone employs vulgarity, its impact lessens, desensitizing people to that sort of language.
Another element of the problem is an increasingly hostile and stressful world. Rudeness is an intuitive reaction to a world that feels designed to antagonize, and studies demonstrate that swearing in particular helps people to mitigate stress, anxiety and depression. When the world feels like an attack, it’s only natural to want to respond in kind.
Unfortunately, this coping mechanism is unlikely to be sustainable. A 2011 study showed that the more you curse, the less impact it has on your ability to endure pain. What’s more, more than 1 in 3 Americans said that, since the pandemic, they almost always or often encountered people behaving rudely when out in public. For most people, “rude” in this instance meant things like cursing and displaying curse words . And yet this revulsion failed to stop phenomena like the slew of grossly titled books that flooded airports and bookstores for the better part of the last decade.
In short, our capacity for intelligent speech is shrinking, our tendency to speak rudely is increasing (with diminishing returns), and our words are losing potency. Despite opposition from most people, these trends are unlikely to stop.
The question then is what can be done? As it turns out, different thinkers from different traditions all have surprisingly similar responses.
Orwellian Language Tips
“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
–George Orwell
As a writer, George Orwell was naturally attentive to the importance of language. He returns to the topic several times across various essays, most overtly in his 1946 treatise Politics and the English Language. Written as a denunciation of the sloppy language invading politics during what he called England’s “general decline,” it provides an evergreen diagnosis for many problems of language today.
While Orwell found the primary causes of linguistic decline to be political and economic, he cautions that it’s not a one-way street. For him, the effect can become the cause, as social ills and poor speech form a reinforcing feedback loop. He compares it to a man awash in failure becoming a drunkard, and his drunkenness deepening his failure. “It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language,” he writes. “It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
But rather than see this ouroboros as a terminal decline, Orwell believes this give and take means that the process of decline can be reversed. The intervention can occur at the level of the individual, someone who chooses to abstain from the bad habits found around him and opting for the good instead:
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
Though his advice was aimed at the written word (this is the essay which produced his famous “6 rules for writing”), practical suggestions like avoiding ugliness, imprecision, and vague words are still applicable. But Orwell’s arguments here remain firmly in the practical and political, and there are in fact far greater reasons to pursue a pure tongue.
The Biblical Case for Beautiful Speech
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
–John 1:1
If ever there was a book that elevates the word, it’s the Bible. In Genesis, God creates the world by speaking its elements into being. As Psalm 33 says “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host.” It’s clear that words and speech are seen as powerful tools of creation.
It makes sense then that the proper use of these tools is regularly discussed in the New Testament. Colossians 3:8 says you should rid yourself of things like slander and filthy language. Likewise, 1 Peter 3:10 cautions that “Whoever would love life and see good days must keep their tongue from evil and their lips from deceitful speech,” and Ephesians 4:29 admonishes you to “not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.”
As for the sort of words you are encouraged to use, Proverbs alone contains a wealth of advice. It says your speech should be “sweet to the soul and healing to the bones” (Proverbs 16:24). You are told that “The soothing tongue is a tree of life, but a perverse tongue crushes the spirit” (Proverbs 15:4) and that aptly spoken words are “like apples of gold inlaid with silver.” (Proverbs 25:11)
It’s clear that the content and intent of speech is of great moral concern. It impacts both your character and your community’s character. Just as God spoke the world into being, so too does your speech craft the world around you into a harsher or kinder one.
But while Scripture shows why improving your speech matters, how do you so you practically?
Some Fatherly Advice
Words were given us to communicate our ideas by: and there must be something inconceivably absurd in uttering them in such a manner as that either people cannot understand them, or will not desire to understand them.
–Earl of Chesterfield, Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son
While cleaning up your language is a great first step, as with anything, it is far more powerful to fight in favor of something than against something. So if you’d like to actively beautify the way you speak, a great resource is the edifying letters the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his son.
In wanting to properly educate the boy into a man, Chesterfield covered nearly every conceivable topic, and proper speech and language came up often. As the Earl wrote:
An agreeable and distinct manner of speaking adds greatly to the matter; and I have known many a very good speech unregarded, upon account of the disagreeable manner in which it has been delivered, and many an indifferent one applauded, from the contrary reason.
For Chesterfield, proper diction – the choice of words and style of delivery – was of the utmost importance. As such, he recommended reading great English authors like Dryden and Swift while paying attention to their language. For your purposes, these particular authors might be outdated, but the principle remains sound. You also have the advantage of being able to hear other’s speak whenever you’d like. So find someone whose manner of speaking draws you in and pay attention to their choice of words, intonations, enunciations and inflections. With enough familiarity and practice, you can start to incorporate more of what makes them great into yourself.
Chesterfield also says to take inspiration from other great orators like Cicero and Demosthenes, the latter of whom famously overcame his stammer by speaking with pebbles in his mouth. Don’t go gobbling river rocks just yet though, as the larger point he’s making is to make a conscious effort to work on a skill which is available to everyone who works for it: “Every man, who can speak at all, can speak elegantly and correctly if he pleases.”
Together, these three sources cover the political, sacred, and social aspects of speech, but they all converge towards a unifying conclusion.
A Final Word on Words
Having gone through the arguments for elevating your language, keep in mind that the standard is not perfection. Even Paul himself couldn’t avoid strong language all the time. In Galatians 5:12, he wished for the Judaizers to castrate themselves, and in Philippians 3:8, he compares his heritage and goodness under the old covenant to “skubalon” – a word which connotes excrement and disgust – next to Christ. But these are the exceptions which prove a rule. For Paul, strong language retained its bite because he used it sparingly.
So while the apologetics for vulgarity have a point, remember that aesthetic judgment carries within it a moral component, something which no scientific study could understand or incorporate into their metrics. As many before you have found, degrading language is not an inevitability. But to avoid it requires effort.
The words you speak and the way you deliver them have the power to shape your small corner of the world. The goal is to practice what was, after all, the very first act of creation, and do so in a way that reflects the power within it.
Coincidentally, today’s first reading was Isaiah 50:4, “The Lord has given me a well trained tongue, that I may speak to the weary a word that will rouse them.”
Johnny Rotten, of all people, never used profanity in his song lyrics because “it gives people an excuse to not listen to you.”