One-Syllable Words

To listen to us talk you'd think
Twenty-dollar words are cheap
But answers can't be bought for any tender

Constantly we complicate
Pointlessly pontificate
'Til things are getting worse instead of better

Look at how far we've come
Maybe we could learn some

One-syllable words
Faith, hope, and love
Truth, peace, and trust
One-syllable words
That's what we need
That's what we need
Yeah.
(Carolyn Arends, "One-Syllable Words," from This Much I Understand, Reunion Records 1999)

It's really quite fun to come across a Carolyn Arends inspiration in my day-to-day reading. Finding the ideas behind my favorite song, "Do We Dare?" in Madeleine L'Engle's book, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art was a delightful surprise. Of course, recognizing the influence of C.S. Lewis on such songs as "Surprised By Joy" and "Not a Tame Lion" is rather a no-brainer, but it still brings that smile of a shared reference to the lips of the listener.

Now, I cannot say with certainty that one of my husband's all-time favorite Carolyn Arends songs, "One-Syllable Words," was definitely inspired by G.K. Chesterton, but I do believe that she was most likely reading or re-reading Orthodoxy sometime in the late 1990's. In Chapter VIII, "The Romance of Orthodoxy," when reading his assertion that what is considered the bustle and strenuousness of the modern age is really a profound laziness and fatigue that disguises as busy-ness a dearth of real activity and productivity (1908 sounds -- in this regard and in many others discussed throughout Orthodoxy -- quite a bit like 2006) I found these surprisingly familiar ideas:

And this which is true of the apparent physical bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect. Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. . . . The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration." (Image Books Edition, 2001; p. 129-130) (Emphasis mine)

I'll never forget Jason's reaction when he first heard, "One-Syllable Words." He was at UCLA at the time, and he was taking a particularly annoying English course. He heard Carolyn sing, "Psycho-babble, legal-ese/People earning Ph.D.s in/Post-modern paranoid confusion/Self-indulgent rhetoric/Talk and talk until we're sick/Our arguments end with no conclusion/Can't we make the point clear/Maybe what we need here/Are one-syllable words . . ." I think a lot of his frustration with certain classes and professors at school came into clear focus then. My husband is a plain-spoken man. His degree is in Economics. He hates verbal gobblety-gook. That was the day, I think, that he really gave Carolyn a chance and stopped laughing at the "lie-dee-die-dee-dies" in "Seize the Day." And as I type the lyrics out, I am again astounded and humbled by Carolyn's magnificent wordplay. She is indeed a master craftsman of words, whether multi-syllabic or not.

This is almost entirely unrelated, but "One-Syllable Words" always reminds me of an incident in the Amy Grant video, Building the House of Love. One of her smarmy producers is complimenting her excessively after a recording take, while at the same time trying to weasel in that he needed another take with a few changes made. Amy Grant kind of cut through his crap when she sighed and said, "Just tell me what you want me to sing." I always liked that moment of non-diva-ness from Ms. Grant. "Just tell me what you want me to sing." Just say what you want to say. Let's get it out there and not dance around in an elaborate deception of trying to manipulate with words.

I think the ending of Carolyn's song is the best philosophy of living ever written. And it is all in one-syllable words:

Faith and hope and love
Truth and peace and trust
Dream and play and watch and pray
Learn and live and laugh and give
Reach and fly and seek and try
With all your heart and soul and mind
Oh yeah.