In my school life, S., I have been enthused about “English language and literature” — actually, creative writing — from the day I learned to sound out words (phonetics) and raise my reading skills well above grade.

That launch, of course, was a long time ago.

Today in the post-9/11 environment, I’m positioned to narrow down into relationships in which language and language behaviors promote or inaugurate conflict by way of mind. Fields relevant: anthropology, linguistics, psychology.

We’re a wild species, also gregarious and aggressive, both gifted and cursed with intelligence, imagination, and language: we need to know how some things work or are working to improve the odds of our own survival and the concommitant appreciation of the qualities of it.

I should revisit my resume / timeline for the purposes of contracting, consulting, or grant getting because this area in “conflict studies” needs an approach by a mind oriented toward aesthetics and poetry rather than a clinician looking primarily at social science statistics. There has to be a feel for the human, even the fearsome human, to find the channels away from destruction and humiliation and enslavement.

It is within the power of language to grant license to horror, and with a world made small by many technologies — in communications, manufacturing, shipping — language, a God-given ability developed around mouth, ears, and mind, becomes a cultural and social technology of the greatest interest.

We don’t need to “control language” the way we do, say, a shipping schedule — and woe to propagandists of all kinds — but we may need to get into the evolution a little bit and work away from some behaviors and ideas.