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THE RIGHT WORD ANALYSIS
Hello, welcome to another tutorial video. This is an excellent poem – ‘The Right
Word’ – mainly because it gets us thinking about language and the words we use. So even
though here it’s actually talking about the connotations, in the degrees it talks
about terrorism, freedom fighter, hostile militant, etc., etc., the way we see the kind
of other, it can be applied to anything just in terms of the word ‘best’ or the word
‘worst’ or the word ‘hate’ etc., etc., and just thinking about all the degrees and
connotations that we link with them. It’s a fantastic poem. But we’ll go through this
in general, specifically we’ll be going through it with SMILE as ever.
So we look first of all at the structure and we’ve got these short stanzas and they actually
show that the person is coming to very quick judgements. So they’re just kind of hitting
out ideas very, very quickly and obviously that’s important to the theme as it goes
because we’re actually thinking about the language and the language change, once the
person starts thinking.
Now the thinking itself is actually reflected in the use of questions. So the first statement
is made and then we have a question actually thinking and considering what that is and
we have another one here. So the first one is actually thinking about have I actually
made the right choice by using that word? And then the second one actually starts to
question words in general, well what do they do? And so that’s like a level one thought
and then this is like a level two thought, because obviously building from that one,
and there are no more questions throughout he poem, simply because once we get to that
point there, we start questioning everything and maybe start seeing things how they were
and so that part there is really interesting because it’s thinking for yourself, and
it’s only in thinking for ourselves maybe where we get to see more common ground than
just listening to these kinds of words that other people are using. That’s just one
way of looking at it.
Another really interesting structural feature of this is the changing definition of what
we’re seeing in the action all the way through. So we start off in the most terrifying way
and then it ends up in just this really kind of soft and loving and homely unified way,
so it’s kind of like an upside down triangle where everything’s kind of coming into a
point from being so distant but it all comes towards us at the end. The reason that’s
important is because it really focuses on once we start thinking beyond our fears or
actually trying to confront some of our fears, what could happen with some of our ideas,
etc., etc., etc., and I’m sure you’ve got loads of examples in your own life where
you had a stereotype of prejudice and then when you worked towards dealing with it you
found that it really ebbed away. And that’s what the reader’s inviting us to do here
with the terms used, especially the very commonly used terms, etc.
Interestingly enough there’s no judgement on the right or wrong of the terms themselves,
it’s just the idea of trying to connect with the people, rather than the term, is
going to make a difference. So you’ve got the terrorist who becomes
a freedom fighter, becomes a militant, becomes a warrior, becomes a martyr, becomes a child,
etc., etc., but also the way that they are moving, hanging in the shadows, that’s really
important. So they go from lurking to taking shelter to waiting to watching, etc., etc.,
etc., so not only does the person there change but the tone or the atmosphere round them
changes as well. So look at what happens and changes in the shadows and the fact that actually
changes all the way through is just showing the power of the thoughts and how thinking
and watching and waiting before jumping to conclusions actually makes a difference.
So what themes do we have? Well the first one that comes through is fear, this fear
of the other, this person outside and that’s really represented by the fact that outside
is the first one is outside, outside of my sphere of knowledge, outside of my sphere
of reference, outside of my realm of understanding, outside my confidence, whatever it is, that
word ‘outside’ represents so much in that. And then from there, that’s where we have
our fears because it’s something outside, it’s something we don’t know, it’s something
distanced from us.
Second of all we’ve got this feeling coming through towards the end of common ground and
all the things that we actually share, so we see here we have this ‘child that looks
like mine’ and we have ‘a boy who looks like your son too’ and this person comes
‘and eats with us’. So that common ground being referenced there is the common ground
that maybe which should all try and get to to actually find unifying threads between
us, rather than using these labels that are actually mentioned earlier, to separate and
split us.
The third thing I picked up upon, the reason I like the poem so much, is it’s all about
language, it’s all about the words that you use and what they could mean and how it
then be put, you can completely set someone up in someone else’s eyes in a sentence.
If you say ‘hey we’re going to go and meet so and so later, he’s or she’s blah,
blah, blah’, you’re literally going to prejudice the person’s understanding of
what’s going to happen or how they’re going to take the person, whether you like
it or not and just that language power, just one person being able to transfer information
to another person and the words that they transfer that with is just going to make all
the difference in the world to how that other person’s actually going to understand it,
and when you think about the mass media and how it kind of affects us and how we actually
look about people, talk about people, discuss people, it’s massively, massively important.
And a few changed words in a lot of our daily discourse; you try it, try and find out a
way of speaking – I’m sure you do it already actually, I’m sure you speak to your mum
differently, speak to your dad differently, speak to your teacher, especially when you
want something or when you’re trying to make your own point. You know you can’t
speak to them all in the same way, or you can but it’s not going to be the most effective
way of speaking to them and just that idea of language control, the power of our words
etc. that’s really important.
It also brings us to thinking about the prejudices that arise from the words that we use and
obviously the connotations we have with them, but that’s quite an obvious one, especially
in this case when we’re using a word like ‘terrorist’.
What knowledge does for you and what patience could do for you. That’s like a secondary
thing I just wanted to bring up because remember through thinking about it and actually considering
it, this poet or this person actually watching through, actually considering it and going
through their options and thinking about it. Before they act upon anything the only action
this person does apart from watching, is to invite the boy in. So it’s actually showing
you if you’re patient and you look and you understand and you try and reason, then you
can come to a connection, etc. And I think that’s quite an important message to actually
be taken.
So we look then at images. I really like the idea of the image that’s really striking,
of the darkness outside, just the shadows, the shadows, the shadows. I think that’s
really important because it doesn’t just represent the darkness in itself, but it represents
the dark area to us that the other person might be from, not literally as in skin colour,
but like in terms of the lack of knowledge we’ll have about a race or a people or a
culture, etc., and be fearful or be frightened of it. And obviously that darkness there comes
with the idea of something sinister, it’s just the natural association before we take
steps to try changing that.
The image of the morphing figure what it becomes, well you can say kind of grenade laden terrorist
who suddenly becomes this sword swinging freedom fighter who becomes this bomb creating hostile
militant, you can just see all these images kind of being created until it becomes this
little boy who just kind of walks in and takes off their shoes. It’s just a massive transformation
and to have one image change so much all the way through a poem it’s really challenging.
Can you take that all the way? Can you make the person change as the person sees it? Or
did you see it when you read the poem as seven or eight different people coming in, change
and change again? Or did you actually take the principle idea and change that? So I think
it’s an interesting idea to run with.
We’ve got the image as well of the poet watching and just imagine the look on their
face as they decide, ‘ah hold on, no it’s this’ how scared are they there? How scared
are they there? How scared are they there? How surprised are they there? How shocked
and touched are they by then? Etc., etc., and then what’s going on here?’ So you
think of the poet as well and how they’re watching it and what that brings home to us
about the fear, the change of fear or how knowing a bit more and watching and waiting
to gather all the information actually makes a difference.
And also I’ve mentioned the changing shadows. The shadows are really influenced the character
that we’re looking at them in, or that influence the character. So by the time we get down
towards the end we’ve got this boy, yes ‘lost in the shadows’. So this child now
is ‘lost in the shadows’, whereas before the person was lurking, they were using the
darkness to their advantage but now here this person needs help out of the darkness. So
the change in the shadows around them I also find a really powerful image.
So the language then. We’ve got the words ‘out’ and ‘in’ or ‘outside’ and
‘in’ repeated quite a lot. So at the beginning you’ve got ‘outside’, ‘outside’,
‘outside’, ‘outside’ and then towards the end we have the ‘come in’, ‘come
in’, ‘the child steps in’, so then it just cements the unification, cements the
joining from the split that we had at the beginning and the distance that we had at
the beginning. Because the darkness in that way and the shadows can actually be seen as
a barrier as well, because we can’t access that person properly because of whatever barriers
that are actually there in the shadows, known or unknown, and that’s worth extending and
actually taking and thinking about further.
We’ve got language we’ve got ‘you’ used a couple of times to actually directly
involve the reader, to actually make us think about what it is we hold that is similar.
How would we see things from another point? How could we put ourselves in someone else’s
shoes and see why they do what they do? And also we’ve got the repetition that’s actually
all the way through and that’s just a technique just to keep us in the same place but change
it slightly, just this slight moulding, this general ebbing away, kind of the idea, just
washing it down into something else. And that’s only done by keeping the same idea and obviously
in that way you’d have to keep a lot of the same words and repeat them to let the
things that you change then become all the more important. So you’ve got ‘outside
the door’, ‘outside the door’, ‘outside your door’ and then little bits change just
to change your whole perception of it.
So read through it again and see how it changes and what you actually think about as you’re
going through. And you’ve also got alliteration here, just really bringing the power of the
actual words home to us because it’s really making us focus on that section.
So the effect on the reader then? Well it makes us think about our prejudices and what
we believe and don’t believe and what kind of associations we’ve made with certain
words etc., etc., etc. It makes us think about what we hear and react to, so when we hear
certain words not only just like what words do we have, but it’s when we hear certain
words, how does it make us feel? What does it do to us positive, negative? What words
are used to actually trigger us? Etc., etc. I mean I think it was Philip K *** who said
‘he who controls words, controls the people that use the words’ and that’s fascinating
because there’s a lot that can be said. I mean obviously if you read 1984 then you’ve
probably got some idea of the whole philosophy behind this, whatever Orwell’s intentions
were, but the idea of being able to, imagine if you take some words away from the dictionary
what would then happen, or I think it’s quite a common one you might have come across
– the enhanced interrogation or the phrase enhanced interrogation – is quite a new
term in our lexicon, in our dictionary almost. Before we just kind of called that torture,
but now because of the situation that we’re in we just develop new terms and new words,
for well that’s not torture, it’s enhanced interrogation, etc., etc., etc. There are
hundreds of different examples so you can think about that. So it just makes us think
about how we hear and react to and obviously things are softened for us then. The diplomacy
with which words are used to try and ease things is quite good. It’s actually, if
anyone is interested in linguistics it would be a really, really good study element to
actually develop that.
And lastly, we actually think about other peoples’ motives. Why could other people
be using those words? What do they want us to associate with them and what do they want
us to think? 1