Serpent Speak

When I was younger I thought the forked tongue was a limited-use tool, a tool of crooks and charlatans. But as my solar lap-count increases, I discover ever more versions of it. The "inside joke" is a simple example when used to block, through embarrassment, individual action against group norms: ancillary comments that keep an issue moving in the desired direction. All forms of mass advertising survive by the creative misuse both of words and of symbols: create pleasant associations with a product, regardless of relevance. Human Resource departments spend much energy precisely misusing words. The goal: help the staff while keeping the management out of court. Examples like these raise the question: Is the deliberate misapplication of words a necessary evil? And if so, can a dove-like influence be had by means of the serpent’s tongue?

Instinctively I have always thought not. But experience suggests something different.

Cast the question under inverted light: Does anyone achieve effective influence (or the moving of an issue) through 100% transparency? I don’t believe I’ve seen it. Rather the crux of influence in real-life examples, even the good ones, associates with a whole set of non-verbal behaviors, which primarily exude confidence—and this accompanied by a host of creative verbiage. Often I’ve observed that words are used to keep others’ minds on track (or off the track of problematic, collateral, issues). For example, the most effective managers talk constantly, but the talk is mostly to keep a conversation going—not necessarily to inform, to persuade, or to direct. When the time comes for something important to be said, this on-going conversation puts them in the default position to define the debate. And generally the result is that when the action begins, the listeners are poised either to participate or to go along passively. All the while their words’ meanings, taken at face value, rarely convey the full implication of what is happening, or what may happen.

Happy are those whose wielders of words turn out to have done them a service. But woe to them when the swindlers and blind turned out to have been speaking.

Is language so plastic after all? Are malleable meanings merely the idiom of our time and place, or has this been going on for ages? I have always wanted words to function like money, a common currency for trade and interaction between uncommon people. But it has mostly failed to be so. More often others trade on unspoken subtleties behind, or surrounding, the words themselves. And I have not learned the accounting of invisible tender.

And so I come around to Jesus' words: “Be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” Although the forked tongue is not allowed (let your Yes be Yes), neither does He seem to require an exact correspondence between the literal word and real action, except on the level of integrity. Indeed the most significant text in this regard says it all: “And he spoke to them as one having authority. Not like the Scribes and Pharisees.”