anger and sadness
In my Semantics and Pragmatics course this spring, my final assignment was to write a paper comparing two emotions and how they are lexically conveyed in the English language. I wanted to really care about a project that would require so much time and thought, so I chose two emotions I've been learning a lot about and still need to learn about more: anger and sadness. I conducted a number of interviews regarding how English speakers use words to express these emotions, and the results helped me understand a few incredibly important concepts. The final project turned out to be quite extensive, but I found it so interesting that I wanted to provide here a brief summary of my lexical analysis of anger and sadness.
Interviewing on the emotion of anger proved fascinating, particularly because I was interviewing at my university, and thus all of my interviewees were Christians. What I found was that, not surprisingly, the most effective way English speakers can verbally communicate anger is generally through expletives/swear words. In a moment of intense anger, these words have the intensity to match. However, as Christians, we have essentially sworn off most expletives as words that should never be said. And while I still fall into that camp, ("what the heck" is about as explicit as I'll get) I started to notice a disturbing pattern. While some of my interviewees said that they use strong expletives when angry, the other interviewees essentially remained silent. It became clear that the weak forms of swear words (e.g. "frick," "shoot," "what the heck") were not strong enough to actually convey the anger. Thus without vocabulary angry enough to communicate, most interviewees said that they do not verbally express their anger.
Considering how much I have learned in the past few months about the importance of expressing our emotions, I found this very helpful in understanding the struggle many of us face. Anger is not evil, though its consequences can be. As a general rule, anger is our response to things that are not right or not how we had hoped/wanted. More importantly, anger is simply a feeling that we feel because we are human; we are more fully human when we fully feel it. However, the fact that English communicates anger through expletives may have influence on the fact that Christians have come to act like anger must be suppressed at all times. Perhaps we need to re-think new ways we can express the fullness of our anger, or maybe reconsider whether expletives are as terrible as we might have thought.
I came across a different and more serious situation in regards to the lexical expression of sadness. When asked how they verbally expressed the emotion of sadness, one or two interviewees said that they might use the phrase, "I'm sad," but other than that there were no real answers. Almost every other interviewee said that they didn't know any words they could use to express themselves in the state of being deeply sad. They also consistently tied sadness to loneliness, and I started to see a kind of cyclical connection. Perhaps the English lack of expressive terms for sadness causes isolation because the person simply cannot communicate their feelings. This isolation would not surprisingly lead to feelings of loneliness, feelings of not being understood or remembered or valued. And that loneliness seems to lead back into sadness, beginning the cycle again. As English speakers, we can better understand each other by acknowledging that we simply do not have the words to convey the depths of our sadnesses.
As I concluded, I wondered whether other languages also struggled to express their sadness. I don't think I know any others well enough to be able to decide "yes" or "no" from my own knowledge, but I suddenly remembered Romans 8:26, where Paul is speaking to the Romans about the suffering they are facing, and giving them hope. He reminds them that the Spirit Himself is interceding and praying for them with "groans too deep for words." Even for a fluent speaker of Greek and Hebrew, Paul still also felt that the Spirit had to be the one groaning for us, unable to find vocabulary to convey the suffering and agony. So perhaps this struggle is universal, sadness is simply impossible to fully express.
So these are the thoughts of an analytical linguist on the depths of emotions. I hope that these pieces of knowledge about our own language help you how they have helped me, by reminding me that my words are essential parts of my ability to be honest with myself, with others, and with God. But I also hope that you can have more grace for yourself and others by being reminded of the fact that we have so few words to actually express our emotions. I hope that in that understanding we can somehow find more ways to simply exist in empathy with one another, acknowledging that our identity as human beings includes our identity as feelers.
Interviewing on the emotion of anger proved fascinating, particularly because I was interviewing at my university, and thus all of my interviewees were Christians. What I found was that, not surprisingly, the most effective way English speakers can verbally communicate anger is generally through expletives/swear words. In a moment of intense anger, these words have the intensity to match. However, as Christians, we have essentially sworn off most expletives as words that should never be said. And while I still fall into that camp, ("what the heck" is about as explicit as I'll get) I started to notice a disturbing pattern. While some of my interviewees said that they use strong expletives when angry, the other interviewees essentially remained silent. It became clear that the weak forms of swear words (e.g. "frick," "shoot," "what the heck") were not strong enough to actually convey the anger. Thus without vocabulary angry enough to communicate, most interviewees said that they do not verbally express their anger.
Considering how much I have learned in the past few months about the importance of expressing our emotions, I found this very helpful in understanding the struggle many of us face. Anger is not evil, though its consequences can be. As a general rule, anger is our response to things that are not right or not how we had hoped/wanted. More importantly, anger is simply a feeling that we feel because we are human; we are more fully human when we fully feel it. However, the fact that English communicates anger through expletives may have influence on the fact that Christians have come to act like anger must be suppressed at all times. Perhaps we need to re-think new ways we can express the fullness of our anger, or maybe reconsider whether expletives are as terrible as we might have thought.
I came across a different and more serious situation in regards to the lexical expression of sadness. When asked how they verbally expressed the emotion of sadness, one or two interviewees said that they might use the phrase, "I'm sad," but other than that there were no real answers. Almost every other interviewee said that they didn't know any words they could use to express themselves in the state of being deeply sad. They also consistently tied sadness to loneliness, and I started to see a kind of cyclical connection. Perhaps the English lack of expressive terms for sadness causes isolation because the person simply cannot communicate their feelings. This isolation would not surprisingly lead to feelings of loneliness, feelings of not being understood or remembered or valued. And that loneliness seems to lead back into sadness, beginning the cycle again. As English speakers, we can better understand each other by acknowledging that we simply do not have the words to convey the depths of our sadnesses.
As I concluded, I wondered whether other languages also struggled to express their sadness. I don't think I know any others well enough to be able to decide "yes" or "no" from my own knowledge, but I suddenly remembered Romans 8:26, where Paul is speaking to the Romans about the suffering they are facing, and giving them hope. He reminds them that the Spirit Himself is interceding and praying for them with "groans too deep for words." Even for a fluent speaker of Greek and Hebrew, Paul still also felt that the Spirit had to be the one groaning for us, unable to find vocabulary to convey the suffering and agony. So perhaps this struggle is universal, sadness is simply impossible to fully express.
So these are the thoughts of an analytical linguist on the depths of emotions. I hope that these pieces of knowledge about our own language help you how they have helped me, by reminding me that my words are essential parts of my ability to be honest with myself, with others, and with God. But I also hope that you can have more grace for yourself and others by being reminded of the fact that we have so few words to actually express our emotions. I hope that in that understanding we can somehow find more ways to simply exist in empathy with one another, acknowledging that our identity as human beings includes our identity as feelers.
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| a stormy ocean was a metaphor that interviewees mentioned for both anger and sadness. |
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