Language has held my interest for as long as I remember. I love puns, word games, riddles and limericks. I have an uncanny ability to remember jingles and nursery rhymes that I should have forgotten thirty years ago. I love deciphering what a word might mean in relation to other words, like, for instance — the family of ‘light’ words; luminary luminosity, luminous – or our favourite cartoon B&B host; Lumiere.
All descended from the Latin word lumen, meaning light. If you’re less prone to word-nerdery than me, this might feel like a novel concept; words, like us, have ancestors.
At Uni, when studying advertising, we were specifically taught how to employ words. What to say to get people to buy! Buy! Buy! One phrase would stifle a purchase and the next would cause a sell out. And it is just words. All day, every day we are at the mercy of words and the adage sticks and stones might break my bones, but words will never hurt me has never been true. Words can wound1, and they can also heal2. Words matter.
Having known all this for such a long time it surprised me that it took me so long for me to decipher the following;
The word soft — is not — the antonym for strong.
If grammar is not your jam; an antonym is an opposite word. And to be clearer, should I describe a person as soft, I have yet to comment on their strength. They are unrelated terms.
I am a soft human being. I am a highly sensitive person. I read this book and it felt like reading tarot. Let’s be clear though, a highly sensitive person is not someone who is on the brink of meltdown. A highly sensitive person is someone who is attuned to the things going on around them. All the time.
It is easy to imagine why attunement to relationships and environment would have evolved in some of us. Survival depended on it. Today though, sensitivity is shamed. And so is empathy and softness and kindness.
Softness equals weakness — except it doesn’t.
In modern language, bad actors have co-opted the word soft to be pejorative. A swear word, a slur, a put-down. I could guess as to why they would want to do that, but that’s not my work to do.
My work, has been to untangle softness from weakness;
They are not the same.
There is soft
and there is strong,
I am both.
When skyscrapers were developed at the turn of the twentieth century it was an engineering marvel. The invention of steel and elevators gave rise to towers made of seemingly very hard materials. But even skyscrapers have their limits. In the world of materials science this is known as toughness.
But toughness is not simply hardness and strength. Toughness is the ideal zone where a material has both strength and flexibility. The material must contain softness, without it, the material will fracture under stress.
The minute this clicked for me; that strong and soft are separate adjectives; my life got better. The things I was told would break me; grief, euthanising a pet, job loss, illness —have not. I was told that if I loved too hard I would fracture later. If I dared to fling myself from the safety of the trapeze into the air of awe and joy then the inevitable fall would kill me. I did it anyway. And I survived. I survived because softness caught me. Even on very bad days softness has shown up as generosity, friendship, community, beauty and awe. Softness is sustenance.
So now, when I hear slurs pertaining to softness, I chuckle; they do not know what I know. I am not brittle, stiff, unyielding. I am flexible, malleable, resilient. I am soft and strong.
- Teicher, M. H., Samson, J. A., Anderson, C. M., & Ohashi, K. (2010). Hurtful words: Association of exposure to peer verbal abuse with elevated psychiatric symptom scores and corpus callosum abnormalities. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 167(9), 1464–1471. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2010.10010030
↩︎ - Lee, M. M., Turetsky, K. M., & Spicer, J. (2017). Cognitive, social, physiological, and neural mechanisms underlying self‑affirmation: An integrative review. Yale Review of Undergraduate Research in Psychology. https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.yale.edu/dist/a/1215/files/2017/06/Michelle-1horxii.pdf ↩︎
Featured Image of Lion: Pexels
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