Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

The Semantics of Signage

Sometimes, semantics lead us into problems.

I recently talked about the degradation of language here, but, at the risk of becoming repetitive in my ranting, I passed another sign Sunday morning that really irritated me. This time it wasn’t text message language used in advertising, it was formal English. It wasn’t at a business, either, it was at a church. The sign simply proclaimed: “The victim of Good Friday is the victor of Easter.”

Victim? Victim??

Before we even discuss the concept of marketing and applying it to a community of faith, let us stop and think about this. Since when did Christ become a victim? As I recall the Scriptures, He specifically stated that no one took His life from Him, but that He willingly laid it down. He made the choice when He decided the Father’s will be done over His. Being a victim involves the absence of choice. Should you or I, God forbid, be victimized by a crime, we had no choice. We were walking down the street, for example, and the mugger stepped out of the shadows. We didn’t choose for that to happen, but it happened to us. We were, in this hypothetical situation, victims. Yet, if I pass someone on the street that is asking for money, and I give him that money, I’ve made a choice. I have no right to complain about not having the money later. I’m not a victim.

I’m sure the signage in question was meant well and with none but the purest motives, but their clever alliteration proves truly damaging upon closer inspection. Are we taking the victim mentality of which we’ve become so fond in America, with which we shun responsibility for our actions, and projected that onto Christ? Are we claiming Jesus was a product of His environment? Worse, are we claiming that He got pushed into something He didn’t know was coming? If He was murdered, then how in the world does that benefit us? What use was it? To say He was a victim is theologically very dangerous, because it robs Him of His deity, and thus robs the action of its power.

What disturbs me even more is what I perceive to be the issue behind this problem. Any writer or advertiser, when pushed up against a deadline, can come up with some low-quality copy in order to get the project in on time. I’m sure that’s what likely happened here, but let’s look at the bigger issue…you know, besides misrepresenting Christ to everyone driving by. The issue is: why do we feel the need to market our communities of faith? Why do we feel as though we have to place clever slogans on signs by the roadside to “bring people in?” Or worse, place gaudy digital light shows in front of the buildings that give the weather and announcements in addition to “clever slogans,” as well as make you think you’re approaching an emergency vehicle when you get within a block of the church building? Since when did we become convinced that Christ needs marketing? Doesn’t Scripture say that He draws people to Himself? I don’t recall reading anything about target demographics in the Canon.

I think we’ve derived this from our horrible Western tenacity that leads us to adopt the view that we are “building a church,” in the same way that one would “grow a business.” Suddenly, it is about raising attendance on Sunday mornings, about quantity over quality. And so we advertise. And so we market. And so we inadvertently damage so much, so many, in our pressure to make the deadline for the next sign, or the next set of bulletins, or the next set of graphics.

I hope that, at some point, we’ll realize that what we think is clever alliteration isn’t perceived by skeptics as clever at all, but is in fact perceived as stupid. I shutter to think how He perceives it. We’ve become enslaved to our Western business model as a manner in which to “do church.” I think we’re so entrenched in it, so shallow in what Packer referred to as our “thousand-mile-wide and inch-deep” faith, that we truly have become victimized by our own pressure for success.

Don’t blame us, though. We’re just products of our environment.

Place Holders

While Karen and I were moving into our new apartment a few weeks ago, my friend, one of many helping us move that day, passed me on the stairway, out of breath, and said that I had two options: never move again, or not be friends with him by the time I did.

The reason he was out of breath is because, once again, we chose a third floor apartment, and we counted something in the neighborhood of 38 steps up. That’s a lot of trips from the moving truck. And the apartment has an upstairs. I haven’t felt the need to go to the gym for a while.

I love third floor (or fourth, or whatever the topmost level happens to be) apartments because of both practical privacy reasons, but also because of the view. I like to see things, to look out over the other buildings and the streets in the mornings as things come to life. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not a God-complex…and it’s certainly not that I’m a morning person…but my favorite spot in the mornings to pray and meditate is in our sun room, watching the sun rise over the horizon, and watching the street below begin to come to life with runners, dog-walkers, people who leave for work earlier than I (not difficult, as I have punctuality issues). I like to take time to ponder the possibilities that the new day brings…as Jeremiah pens in Lamentations, His mercies are fresh every morning. What will happen with this particular day? What will be required of me? Will I be prepared to meet that challenge? How will I make today count in the truest sense of time, and not just wait for the marker to pass on a calendar?

When Karen and I were married, our friends gave us the use of their beach house for the week of our honeymoon. When we arrived that evening, the steps to the front door were lined with candles as our friends had gone out of their way to ensure a beautiful and unforgettable beginning to our new life together. Karen saved several of the candle holders from that evening, and currently has decorated one window ledge of our sun room with them. I can’t see them and not smile. They’re not expensive in any way, but they are placeholders for a beautiful and cherished memory. That day, that evening, was amazing for so many reasons. My mind will still spin today with a depth of emotion I can’t convey in a few sentences when I remember that night, and those candle holders will always bring about those emotions. This struck my attention while I was thinking a few mornings ago, thinking about time and possibilities.

What struck me immediately after was that, folded on the back of my chair, was a down comforter that I had purchased for my grandmother about four years ago. It’s blue, with snowmen on it. My first Christmas in grad school, when I was focusing on school full time and living just above the poverty line, I had spotted this comforter in Target unexpectedly. It was cheap, I was poor, and I called my parents to get their opinion on whether or not Grandma would like the comforter as a Christmas gift. They assured me she would, and they were right. The thing with being an only grandchild was, at least as far Grandma was concerned, that I could no wrong, and that everything was special when it came from me. Ironic, because I hadn’t put much thought into the gift. I almost always purchase gifts impulsively, and the comforter had been no exception. It was with her until the end, in her hospital room. Regardless of how poor her memory became, she always remembered that comforter had been a gift from me. She would claim it was the only thing that would keep her warm.

The irony of that contemplative morning a few days ago was striking to me: the still stinging memory of my grandmother’s death represented by the comforter, and the immediate smile that I cannot stop upon seeing the candle holders from our honeymoon, both occurring in the same minute, both in the same room. It made me think of time, of endings and beginnings, of second chances to get things right, and then third chances after that. It made me think of grace.

Time progresses, keeps moving forward. Relationships change, as mine and Karen has grown since our first week of marriage. My relationship with my grandmother had declined through no fault of anyone’s as we were distanced not only geographically from one another, but by the age-induced fog that obscured her cognitive processes during her final years. Those two items, a comforter and a collection of candle holders, serve as placeholders for points in time. They are both inexpensive, and both invaluable. They both transport me back to treasured moments in a past I shared with two people I love very much, and they inform my present. They both make me smile. They both trigger memories more valuable to me than I express, of two people more dear to me than I can express.

They both ground me in today, because the love and future hope represented by them both made a difference in both my life and the life of another. They both push me into the day with the knowledge that perhaps I will have a chance to make that day count for something.

They both begin my morning by opening a window into my past that happens to be next to the window to the street below, and, in turn, leave me with a great confidence in the providence of the future.

As Sand In An Hourglass…

Yesterday, I listened to a great lecture on time and the way we manage it (or, rather, pretend to do so) on the Kindlings Muse. You’ll need to listen to it if you want all of the good stuff (and believe me, there’s plenty), but here are some of the more thought-provoking aspects of the talk.

Western culture is a slave to the clock. Karen and I have been discussing what to place over the mantle in our new apartment. We saw a large clock a few days ago while shopping, and immediately agreed on a resounding negative. We don’t want time to be the focus of our lives, and certainly not our living room. That partly resonates with the artistic personality, I guess: what you’re working on is much more important than “what time it is.” Moreover, though, I think I just instinctively push back against the concept of attempting to quantify something as intrinsic to our existence as time. As the lecturer points out, humans can’t imagine a life without time: we’re bound by it. Only God exists outside of time, having created it and therefore not being subservient to it. Western culture, however, joins the rest of the industrialized world in obsessing over time and punctuality. With that comes pressure (another point of the lecture): deadlines, pressure to rush through necessary events in life (like being alone and meditating) in order to be at a meeting on time…you get the idea. I see this as limiting us in many aspects of our lives. Take education, for example: I constantly go back through a peruse the material of the things I’ve received education in, because I still participate in them: Scripture, psychology, theatre, communications. As time progresses, I realize there are enormous implications and aspects that I didn’t completely unpack while I was in school because I wasn’t permitted time to do so; the course imposed a deadline on papers, etc. Languages are the worst for me: I dropped out of my first Greek class because I couldn’t keep up with the pace, a pace I felt the class was conducted upon largely in order to be considered a graduate level course. Had things slowed down, I would have grasped the material much better.

I understand that some cultures, especially island cultures, have a much more laid-back concept of time. Events may be scheduled for 3:00 p.m., but they actually begin when everyone arrives. I can already feel the pressure leaving me as I imagine this. The natural argument here is, of course, that less will get accomplished. Yet, this leads to another point of the lecture: we’re overwhelmed with things that need accomplished, not to mention information to be absorbed and the fact we are constantly in communication with each other. At some point, we’re forced into so many different things that we can’t do any of them well, even if we do make conscious efforts to set boundaries. Perhaps a lower expectation of accomplishment wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

I won’t attempt to summarize the entire talk here, but the result has been changing the way in which I view time. My perspective has shifted when I look at the clock. I think the implications from re-examining both our concept and our usage of time are literally life-altering.

Of course, that assumes we have time to reflect on them.

Now, Where’s That Gonna Go?

So two weeks after moving into our new apartment, things are taking shape and beginning to feel like “home,” or at least as much as an apartment can. Most of this afternoon was spent with final tweaking, and unpacking books to place them on the bookshelves, the placement of which we had finally decided. Karen and I both have our share of obsessive-compulsive tendencies (I prefer “organizationally gifted”), and we like to organize our bookshelves by book type: plays together, fiction together, childrens’ lit. together…you get the idea. As we were placing old textbooks onto the appropriate shelves, Karen pulled out a text on “Principles of Marketing” from my undergrad, and asked succinctly where to place this as it didn’t match with anything else we own.

The textbook came from a marketing class I took in my last year of my undergrad, when I had (erroneously) stopped 6 credit hours short of my theatre degree, and declared a psychology minor to accompany my other major of communication. Having thus made the decision I would later regret to bow to the questions of “what kind of job are you going to get with that?”, I was looking for a way to make my communications degree more marketable, and I took a marketing class. A little over a year later, I stumbled into the psychology field and have made my living that way ever since, even though I’ve never been able to get theatre out of my blood. God has a sense of humor.

All that to say, I’m glad that a marketing textbook doesn’t fit in with anything else we own, because I hate the concept of marketing. What I realized tonight, though, is that it is an unfortunate necessity in our culture.

The realization came as Karen was distracted and drawn (as will inevitably happen) into reading the books she was trying to place onto shelves. She read some amazing passages by Douglas Coupland, from his book Life After God. I was struck by the ironic connection to our discussion over the marketing textbook, because I would never have picked up this book to read it. The cover is one of the worst designs I’ve ever seen (ironically not the one pictured in this Amazon link; our copy has a baby in a swimming pool. Horrible). My loss, because the passages Karen read aloud were some seriously amazing prose, and I now have every intention of digging into Coupland’s work further. Had she not gotten me past the cover, however, that would have never happened.

Similarly, I was strolling through the local Barnes & Noble last winter and ended up purchasing a copy of Origin by Diana Abu-Jaber (again, not the cover art in this Amazon link…my copy has a white minimalist winter scene that reached off the shelf and grabbed me). I highly recommend the book, which I ended up very drawn into, even though I wasn’t looking for a crime thriller at the time. This one, as it turned out, was of extremely high literary quality. I stumbled onto it because of the cover. Marketing worked here as well as it would have in reverse of the horrible cover to our copy of the Coupland book.

I see marketing having positive and negative effects on us. At the end of the day, I don’t see our culture working without it, but it still ultimately leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because I think it leads to a notable absence of authenticity. The whole idea of selling art and finding a “target audience” is somehow repellent to me, but I see the necessity of it, I suppose. That’s why I’m the writer and not the agent, I guess.

It also lends a fresh credence to that old adage of not being able to judge a book by its cover.

The Degradation of Language

My commute home to our new apartment takes me past a small chiropractor’s office that’s situated right off of the main “strip.” They have an old-style sign at street level: you know, the kind where someone actually comes out and moves letters around manually, instead of the gaudy digital light shows that have become all too prevalent for U.S. businesses. The content of this particular sign struck me more than its design, though:

“Let us care 4 ur spine.”

As I alluded to in my last post, I’m a bit of a technology addict. As such, I certainly utilize text messaging; SMS is the best way to communicate in some circumstances. As the trend has evolved more toward text-based communication, be it email, blogging, Facebook wall posts, or Twitter, there seems to be less voice calling going on, or at least there tends to be less in my world. I’m proficient in text “language;” the short-hand that makes tapping out a message on a standard phone keypad quicker. I also understand that, in many cultures, texting is considered more polite than taking a voice call while with friends or in public.

Since when, though, did it become socially acceptable for advertising to be reduced to text-message language?

I guess I see it as a time and place for everything. When texting someone, I have no problem using the abbreviations that mark SMS language. When typing an email, however, or even tweeting, or in essentially any other written form of communication whatsoever, I stay away from it, because I struggle with the decline of the English language. I struggle with the fact that students in public school systems today think in SMS language. And not just students. I once was asked to proofread a script for a dramatic sketch, written by an adult, that used “lol” in the dialogue. How, exactly, is a character supposed to deliver that???

I’m not opposed to texting, but I think there is a much more limited acceptability thresh-hold than we currently ascribe to it. When it is used in road-side advertising, we’ve passed that thresh-hold. When we permit language to be abbreviated on a consistent basis, we lose the poetry of the language, the nuances of the words, the beauty of the semantics. We allow our language to be degraded into odd character combinations that are the equivalent of misshapen limbs on a deformed body. With the decline of our language follows the decline of our culture. God knows, we’re seeing enough decline in that already, as falling literacy rates and non-existent reading habits of both teens and adults prove. After all, why read a book when you can play a video game, right?

Perhaps when a culture has reached a point where such fast and immediate communication is necessary, we’ve passed a point of no return. I hope not. To think optimistically, however, we cannot permit ourselves to be so hurried all the time that we feel the need to abbreviate and chop up every word and sentence for the sake of expediency, or, even worse, for the sake of what is “cool” at a given time. In doing so, words become cadavers, not living symbols of an existential meaning beyond themselves as they were intended to be. American language and literature is already the object of disdain from most other civilized cultures around the globe. Should we ever hope to move beyond that, we must learn the limits of when to cut short our words.

If any picture is “worth a thousand words,” then how much must it survive on each one of those words? How important must each one be? Hoping against the arrival of a day when we all speak (God forbid) in numbers and algorithms, our words are the most precious way of communicating the contents of our souls. And, if we lose those words, I fear we lose a piece of those souls…or at least the ability to know them as closely…as well.