Just Semantics?

Be careful. Words matter. Etiquette matters. But words. Wow.

Dedication

This is dedicated to my first subscribers, Joan, and Lisa and Suzie - and all the women like them who encourage other women. Sorry I took such a protracted leave of absence:)

It’s not what you say…it’s how you say it.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

“I lost my voice,” I told my daughter on FaceTime, as if the rasping, pack-a-day-smoker, twenty-six octaves lower than normal voice needed explanation.

“I see that,” she noted.

“Do you?” I challenged, because we don’t see voices and because I was suffering from fever-snark. 

“I see Covid hasn’t stolen your nearly funny sense of humor,” she hit below the knee.

“I have to get serious about my diabetes,” I coughed.

“Have you been diagnosed?” her face changed. I regretted saying a word, seeing the look in her eye. Why can I never remember that she’s my worrier/warrior? She had not known this?

“Gestational,” I gagged. “Pre-diabetic. Once, when blood sugar was kinda high,” cough cough, “doctor wanted to put me on meds. You were seniors. I begged him to give me three months and went on that crazy diet and exercise kick.”

“That was insane,” she said.

“I know, I lost so much weight, could bench 165 - I don’t remember what my deadlift was, but…” the coughing took over. 

“No,” she clarified. “It was insane that you never cooked dinner our entire senior year of high school.”

“What are you talking about? You were vegetarians. What was I supposed to cook?” 

“We ate mostly Oreos that year,” she seemed wistful, not traumatized. But I’m an unreliable narrator.

“I remember,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Stop,” she said, laughing that I was coughing again. We hung up. I cried. So much I would change. 

About parenting. Especially about parenting. About every time I’ve lost my voice. About habits I’ve started and stopped.  I can’t bench 165 any more. I’m not sure I could even lift the 45 pound bar off my chest if given a chance. Thanks to Covid. 

I traveled through Dallas on American Airlines in February 2020. At the same time the CDC, WHo and all the other inspectors were traveling on American. Through Dallas. A week later I had a cough, double conjunctivitis, exhaustion, and was seriously unable to climb the steps to my classroom on the second floor. Even though I had been training for another mini-triathlon and was jogging the dog every day, I remember clutching the hand rail, pulling myself up the steps the last day we were in the building. Then lock down hit - I stopped going to the gym with the rest of the world that March, stopped opening my app for yoga and started opening bottles of red wine. The only lifting happening was the recycling box to the curb. 

Writing - or any pursuit of excellence - is subject to this same inertia. After sixteen days off from ‘da stack’ because of a bout of Covid, I find the fingers just won’t slide across the keyboard. Of course I couldn’t sit at the computer and work while my body wanted to sleep and stay in bed. The fever, the cough, the virus - my body needed rest. And LiquidIV. Tea. Soup. It’s been terribly slow healing from this round of the virus. 

Losing my voice is just a cruel metaphor. Writer’s block is real.

I started this gig the week I returned from the Chesapeake Writers Conference in St. Mary’s College, Maryland in June, 2024. The director encouraged all of us to “go home and get on Substack.” I’m usually oppositional defiant disorder and tend to ignore every and all suggestions, especially from humans with titles, but this directive felt like a challenge I could accept. 

Committed, excited, even cooperating with some muse I’d never believed existed, I wrote, published, enjoyed hearing from friends who were enjoying reading my work. Enjoyed, even, assuming the friends I had NOT heard from were unimpressed with my venture. Because I didn’t care who liked or didn’t like my writing, I believed, “we’ve arrived,” me and my baby artist/writer/poet (Artist’s Way, Cameron). I’d found my voice. Nothing could stop us now. 

Then Covid hit again. Knowing this is my third lap around the virus track is shameful. If your initial reaction is, “that’s crazy, there’s no shame in being sick,” hear me. We are a culture that values health, youth, vitality. “Succumbing to an illness” is a natural event, inherent in every life cycle, but we don’t really have empathy in our culture for people who are sick. We don’t really know how to talk to people who are sick. Most of us avoid our friends who are sick. Be honest. Don’t we?

What we practice most in Western culture is judgment. Just listen to the verbs we use when we talk about becoming ill: “succumb, be stricken by, break down, fall ill, catch, contract, fall victim to, take sick…”  We place the activity of becoming ill on the ill person. Semantics? Linguists will tell you, words matter and how we say them reveals a lot about the culture of the people who use them. Even “becoming ill” belies who we blame - you want to become a boxer? Work at it. You want to become a writer? Put in the time. You have agency, you can become disciplined. You can do anything. Manifest it. You want to become ill? Of course you don’t, so why do we say it that way? 

Perhaps you know the famous French phrase, “Tu me manques” ? (You are missing from me). So different from the English, “I miss you.” (It’s all about me.)  Linguistics prove my point. 

I suggest the way we talk about illness reveals the judgments we hold unconsciously against those who become ill. Or old. Or dead.  I suggest it reveals what I’m doing to myself in my recovery, how I’m blaming myself - somehow I’m guilty of, complicit in contracting “Covid” – contracting? I didn’t sign an agreement, but here she is again, Sars-bitch on wheels that wipes me out for the count. 

What would it take to change the language of an entire culture? How much of our ability to be kind, have empathy and show compassion is inherent in the way we learned language? How could we ever move from, “she had Covid” to “Covid had her?”  

What’s in a word? Don’t take my word for it. Semantics: https://philosophyterms.com/semantics/