"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" has to be one of the dumbest truisms going. To Kill a Mockingbird, the late Harper Lee's novel, begins: "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." I was thirteen the first time I broke a bone, but the story of the break isn't nearly as strange as the story of the aftermath.
Waiting to be picked up from some after-school activity, my friend Jessica and I were horsing around in the front courtyard of the junior high school. From the main sidewalk, three shallow steps led down to the small patch of concrete, then three shallow steps back up to the main doors. I tripped over a loose metal cap at the edge of the top step and fell, landing hard on my left arm. It hurt, of course, but I'd had falls before, from bicycles and roller skates and the odd tree limb, and I was certain the hurt would subside. Besides, I didn't want to get in trouble.
Astonishingly stupid in the way only thirteen-year-olds can be, I managed to conceal my injury for several days until my parents demanded the complete truth. I remember being (quite rightly) scolded for failing to confess all from the beginning at least as much as I remember having my broken wrist in a cast for a month.
Given how heedlessly we played as children (my mother would later say that she was glad she never knew just how high we all climbed in the huge poinciana tree in the front yard), it astonishes me how few broken bones my sisters and I collected. But the wrist healed beautifully and has not troubled me since. Ditto the ankle I managed to break five years later.
But decades later, if I wish, I can still summon up some of the words that hurt me. Most of the time, I don't wish to, and time really does heal a lot of those childhood wounds. Life gets a lot easier as the skin gets thicker. Besides - a side benefit of having worked in the letters-to-the-editor department - once a total stranger calls you a lying bitch over the phone, you get really good at not taking things too personally.
Which does not mean that some words are not objectively offensive.
In the divided discourse of today, people are quick to taunt with words that are meant to hurt: "snowflake," "OK Boomer," and similar phrases. When someone says, "That's offensive," it's considered a purely subjective judgment, and many people will deflect by suggesting that the problem lies with the complainer. "If you're that offended...." (Shut up and go away, is the usually unspoken end to that sentence.)
The reality is that part of human society includes sometimes tacit agreements about objective offensiveness. In most cases, when I say, "That's offensive," I don't mean that I am offended. (If I were, that's what I would have said.) Without having discussed it, everyone would agree - for example - that using a yellow cloth Star of David to indicate a non-vaccinated person is objectively offensive. It need not offend any one individual to be so universally unacceptable as to be objectively offensive.
And yet a hat-store owner in Tennessee has made such badges, wears one, and offers them for sale.
Sticks and stones can break bones, of course. But in many cases bones knit together far more readily than the psychic wounds done by words.
There's no easy way to change the hot mess that social discourse often becomes, of course. But as for me and my house, as they say, I can acknowledge the lasting power of words, both to wound and to heal, and to choose those words with care and with an eye toward kindness.
