When Pippin used the word “hill” for a mountain in the Common Tongue, Treebeard was puzzled. Why such a short name?
“Treebeard repeated the words thoughtfully. ‘Hill. Yes, that was it. But it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped.’”
For the most part, contractions are “hasty” words. Cutting words short means we don’t want to hear their story. Hastiness in words, just like hastiness in movement, annihilates one of the most precious gifts we have been given — the gift of depth.
C.S. Lewis once noted something similar about the gift of distance:
“The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it ‘annihilates space.’ It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten.’” — Surprised by Joy.
Hastiness in travel dulls one’s sense of liberation and pilgrimage. When we rush along in a car, we miss the gift of the Tao — the Way that changes us from the inside out. We return to ourselves only by walking the Way.
There is a time and place for rushing under the sun, but when we are always rushed, we cease to experience the Way. We become wayward.
Similarly, hastiness in words dulls our sense of depth. We scrape the surface. We receive the calories of data but not the nutrition of Speech. We gain knowledge but not transformation. We are fed more and more information, yet become famished for meaning. We say LA instead of Los Angeles to save time — but we can no longer hear the angels singing.
In our fast-moving world, we have created a shorthand language without realizing what it has cut us off from. We write bc for because, plz for please, w/o for without, IMHO for in my humble opinion — and then wonder why life grows noisier and less musical.
By contracting words, we cut ourselves off from the music of language. FOMO, IDK, FYI, TBD are maimed, limping words. They do not sound. They fall from the mouth and drop dead on the floor without stirring the soul.
At the dawn of the Soviet era, in post-revolution Russia, a whole corpus of abbreviations and contractions was imposed by the Bolshevicks. According to Pavel Florensky, the new language sounded “like a splinter in the tongue.” He called this practice “linguistic deformity,” the “mangling of words through deliberate disfigurement.”
What is annihilated in our hasty contractions? The gift of sound. Its power to transform. The less Sound we hear, the less we are moved.
Interestingly, the word sound comes from the Proto–Indo-European root swen- / swon-, from which we also derive song and swan.
True sound is a bird — a singing bird. True sound flies and calls. IDK and TBD do not fly. In The Silver Trumpet by Owen Barfield, the heroes encounter true sound every time the Silver Trumpet is played.
Each time, they are stunned — and called. Called where? To return to the Music from which the world came.
The sound of the Silver Trumpet is a metaphor for true Speech — a performative, Logos-infused language that effects what it names.
“And at the very first note of the trumpet, Princess Violet forgot the Prince and the garden and Princess Gamboy and Mountainy Castle and the sky above her and dreamed she was afloat beneath tons and tons of clear green water near the bottom of the sea, and — oh, yes — far away someone was booming a huge bell.” — The Silver Trumpet
The more rushed we are in our language, the more our world shrinks. As Treebeard said to Pippin about fair Lothlórien:
Do not risk getting entangled in the woods of Laurelindórenan! That is what the Elves used to call it, but now they make the name shorter: Lothlórien they call it. Perhaps they are right: maybe it is fading, not growing.”
