Words Matter: Meaning and Power

"Words (and meaningful silences) matter enormously in our lives. They enable us to cooperate, collaborate, and ally with one another-as well as to exclude, exploit, and subordinate one another. They script our performances as certain kinds of people in certain social locations. They are politically powerful, both as dominating weapons that help oppress and as effective tools that can resist oppression. But words in and of themselves are impotent. It is the socially structured practices and historically situated circumstances constituting our social lives that pour content into words, endow them with meaning and power. This book explores how such meaning-making works by examining a number of concrete examples of linguistic practices, many of them very current. Written not for specialists, although I hope some may find it useful, but for anyone willing to join me in examining critically their own ideas about language and its complicated connections to social conflict and change. As that invitation suggests, also writtent to help clarify the author's own understanding of these often complex and contentious issues. The author does not expect that readers will always agree with her perspectives, either before or after reading the book. But hopes that they will, rethink familiar assumptions"--