Empty Words: Against Artificial Language

Language is a place. We cannot see or know that for which we do not have at least some language, and so the language that we speak maps the boundaries of our world. Because we can see and know only what we can speak of, every new facility with language that we gain, whether a new word or a trick of syntax, expands not just what we have available to us to make sense of the world—it expands the world itself, for us. In contrast, when our language is shallow, enervated, or insufficient for our needs, so is the world we inhabit. We grope for what we need in speaking, or even thinking, and we do not find it. We depend upon terms that cannot do the work we need them to do. And we are changed: a diminished language diminishes us.

A person who possesses a lively language, rich and capacious, lives as it were within a homely house, everything well appointed and ready to hand. For a Shakespeare or a Milton, language is not a mere home but an old-growth forest, offering everything a person needs to live and more besides, with bright jeweled birds flitting in and out of view and dung beetles working quietly underfoot.

Very little of any natural language is purposely constructed, and so much within the place of language arises from beyond human intention. Artificial languages like Esperanto offer an obvious and an instructive exception, as such languages generally arise out of an understandable dissatisfaction with the messiness of natural human languages. The dream of an artificial language is that if we could just impose rational human control over our speech, we might have a language that makes better sense, is easier to learn and use, or that even works for higher human purposes of peace and justice. But it turns out that few of us want to speak a language dominated by human intention.

Accordingly, I’m tempted to choose the metaphor of an ecosystem to describe language as a complex system, something that operates with many interrelated parts, each affecting the other. Language as ecosystem points us to the mystery and sufficiency of language, those parts that exist beyond our explicit purposes. It also suggests that what we need to live can be found in this place, that language provides for us, much as a healthy ecosystem can. But language as ecosystem isn’t quite right, because language still exists primarily for human purposes, while our role in an ecosystem can only ever be partial.

Every word ever spoken originates from human culture and human use, and so language must be a place that serves the needs of human beings first if not exclusively. But if language is not precisely an old-growth forest, it’s also not a lab where we produce controlled experiments or an airport given over entirely to the purposes of human commerce. Perhaps the metaphor that will best serve us, then, is that of a garden. Like a garden, language exists for human purposes and under human control—it is not the wild, in which human needs serve only a part.

And yet in any sufficiently complex garden things are always happening that we don’t expect: new plants and animals appear, the soil composition changes, light and shade shift their balance subtly and without our notice. Properly speaking, we do not build or install or construct a garden: we plant and cultivate it. So language. Natural languages share with an ecosystem a complexity and mystery beyond our ability to control, and yet they share with a building the need for human care. So like a garden, language brings the natural and the cultural together to produce a place where, if we get it right, we can feel at home.

Today, the garden of language, our home, has become infested with empty words. Rather than expanding our world, this language lacking real meaning merely obscures. As in the parable, it is as if some enemy came in the night and sowed our well-cultivated garden beds with weeds. Now, with the morning breaking, we arise to find that our neat rows of flowers and vegetables have been overcome with rank and frothy plant matter, good for nothing. Or better—since many of these empty words don’t arise naturally from use but are imposed on us through the machinations of industry and technology—it is as if someone came in the night and paved over our garden with a row of parking meters.

The term “empty words” does not mark a lexical category so much as a tendency of use. Few words lack meaning intrinsically, perhaps with the exception of certain jargon or coinages, like brand names, for commercial purposes. Instead, words become empty of meaning only in use. Consider the term “savings” as it’s employed in commercial contexts, a word that almost always suggests that you will somehow have more money in the bank once you purchase something. Or the adjective “critical,” as used in the phrase “critical thinking.” Since it’s hard to tell that proponents of “critical thinking” believe any other kind of thought exists, then surely the adjective adds nothing at all to the term. (Since I believe in several kinds of thought besides critique, I myself save the adjective “critical” for those occasions when I’m interested in the act of criticism itself.) Neither “savings” nor “critical” lacks meaning as such, as both terms have appropriate, even necessary, uses. In their common usage, however, they obscure meaning rather than revealing it.

An empty box, an empty pot, or an empty mind can be pleasant, because their very emptiness invites us to fill them, with a gift, with sustenance, or with a thought. Not so empty words. If we try to penetrate to their depths, they evade us. All the air removed from them, nothing remains.

Empty words are more than just a distraction or annoyance. Because language maps the boundaries of our world, an empty language diminishes our reality, making of the places we inhabit something less than they ought to be. We can see this especially clearly when we consider the language of the environment and the ecological crisis. A person who thinks of the earth, our common home, as merely an “environment”—a word which, Wendell Berry has pointed out, just means “surroundings”—is not by such a language enabled to see the earth in all its particularity. “The environment” might just be something of a green mass, important for reasons that have nothing to do with any actual plants, animals, or geological features. Insofar as we concern ourselves with “the environment” in general, our language has little to do with its actual referent, operating instead at a level of abstraction that is convenient for political debate but poorly adapted to the pursuit of real understanding. Such abstraction does not serve either real attention to or committed care for the real world, which is why all real “environmentalists” and conservationists concern themselves with particular places and species: the tallgrass prairie, the Missouri River, or the salt creek beetle. When we learn the precise names of the landscapes we inhabit, we do more for those places than any amount of empty verbiage about the environment.

Empty words blight our language, impeding virtue formation and right action. Acting morally depends upon particularity: attention, as Simone Weil has said, is the ground of all charity, because you cannot love what you do not know. In order to respond rightly to the world, we need a conscience formed by particular language, one attentive to the differences between persons and situations. A language inflated by empty words lacks such a particularity, and therefore fails to help us grow in virtue.

Consider the classic language around marriage, found in the Book of Common Prayer, in contrast with modern therapeutic language about the institution. The Prayer Book’s assertion that marriage carries on “in sickness and in health,” for instance, makes something of that bond that is real and meaningful and may indeed help marriages continue where they might not otherwise. Since times of sickness to one spouse will often be times of special tension for the other, “in sickness and in health”—the phrase alone—has likely saved some marriages. To lose the phrase would be to lose something of what marriage is. A less precise phrase would not serve the same purpose. It is the very specificity of “in sickness and in health,” its exact and exacting meaning, that enables it to make marriage something lasting and real. Substitute for “in sickness and in health” a contemporary platitude about relationships like “do what makes you happy” and chaos ensues. The phrase presumes clarity within the person, that you already know what makes you happy. If such clarity does not already exist, “do what makes you happy” is worse than useless. In contrast, “in sickness and in health” gives clarity to a person who may be feeling rather muddled—it assumes that you might need clarification within yourself, and aims to serve you in its bracing specificity. The contemporary phrase, in its imprecision and banality, neither prescribes an exact course of action, nor spurs a person toward virtue, nor even offers a useful heuristic for making a coherent decision. Happiness is of course a nice thing to feel, and yet we ought to remain attentive to the possibility that the word itself is tolerably vague, and therefore likely to lead us wrong.

Because they impede the formation of the conscience, empty words produce violence. In her essay “The Power of Words,” Simone Weil describes “the unreal character of most of the conflicts that are taking place today” as shaped by the use of empty words. Like the Trojan War, Weil sees the conflicts of her time—the middle of the twentieth century—as centered around a phantom. In the Trojan War, “no one felt that the cost was too great, because they were all in pursuit of a literal non-entity whose only value was in the price paid for it.” Yet, “At the heart of the Trojan War there was at least a woman and, what is more, a woman of perfect beauty. For our contemporaries the role of Helen is played by words with capital letters. If we grasp one of these words, all swollen with blood and tears, and squeeze it, we find it is empty.” Language that lacks a clear referent is easily made a weapon: we go to war over concepts, and because these concepts have no reality, they promote perpetual conflict, because we never know whether the objective of the conflict has been achieved.

Our contemporary culture war serves as a good example—one gets the sense that the primary antagonists of this war will always find a new concept to go to battle over, from “family values” to “critical race theory.” These empty words serve only to keep a profitable conflict going. In contrast, for Weil, “Words with content and meaning are not murderous,” because they serve to clarify rather than obscure thought, to bring conflict to a purpose and an end, rather than to prolong it over phantoms. Accordingly, “To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis—to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving human lives.” To endorse and apply empty words, in contrast, is to feed into a system of language that perpetuates violence, and not just the metaphorical violence of offensive language, but the real violence of wars and conflicts motivated by propaganda and by empty speech.

Empty words, finally, are intolerant of silence, where a real and lively language finds its end in the quiet outside speech. Here we would do best to look at the language of modern media. Audiovisual media often exists just to fill up the quiet: think of a waiting room, or a home, with a TV blaring vacuities all day long. The language deployed in such contexts functions simply to push back the silence. Nobody really cares about the “content,” whether it’s an HGTV home improvement show or local news. Such empty words find their way into our individual silences too through the means of social media.

Today’s dominant form of social media is the short video clip, a medium designed for emptiness. A person watching eight-second clips on TikTok can’t reasonably expect to be enriched or informed by the material—you can’t even expect to remember what you watched a half an hour later. We turn to such media only in order to avoid silence and stillness, to save us from the terror of sitting alone with our thoughts. We turn to empty language not as a means of thought, but as a substitute for it. In contrast, a real and lively language invites us to encounter the mystery of stillness. When we finish a poem or a novel, we tend to pause, look off into the middle distance, reflect. In these moments of quiet we are feeling the effect of a language that by its nature makes room for silence.

A language constituted especially by empty words will be a language that does not allow silence, does not inspire right action, and that ultimately places us in a world smaller than reality. Such is much of our contemporary language. Moral scolds and English teachers (but I repeat myself) have of course been railing against the decline of our language for a long time. We may find it easy to dismiss their concerns on the grounds that such complaints arise in each generation.

However, we seldom ask whether the moral scolds had an effect on the decline of the language, or entertain the possibility that their very scolding might have done something to arrest the tendencies they deplored. And even if they did not, the act of taking a stance about what is good in language may be necessary for a writer to clarify his or her own place in letters, even if such a place is only that among the moralists. If I propose to add myself to their number, it is because in this weedy garden, I need to clear a spot where I can stand.

Perhaps the most profound meditation on empty words that I know is Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World. The book depicts a society dominated by the desire for “social stability,” which is to say, comfort and predictability. All reproduction is artificial, carried out in large factories where the residents of the World State are genetically manipulated and behaviorally conditioned to fill their predetermined social and economic role. Lest any discontent with that role arise, the state provides perpetual entertainments: consequence-free drugs, sex with an endless array of willing partners, and expensive electronic entertainment. Huxley’s World State is a post-industrial paradise, where scarcity no longer exists and human comfort is all. The constant distraction and amusement ensures that residents of the World State want nothing more than they’ve got. Politically, the book’s key insight is that the most critical threat to our freedom arises not from some big-government strongman imposing his will upon us, but from our own appetites. With all their lusts fulfilled, the citizens of the World State have no interest in political, religious or intellectual freedom. Their lives have meaning only in chemical highs, frequent orgasms, and electronic entertainment—and that’s precisely how they want it.

Into this post-industrial playground Huxley places his protagonist, John. Born outside the industrial and cultural system of the World State, John possesses the last vestige of culture in Huxley’s world—he has found and read a copy of William Shakespeare’s complete works. So powerful does he find Shakespeare’s words—though, without a teacher or any cultural guidance, he understands them only partially—that John speaks almost entirely in Shakespearean diction. When asked if he’s John, he answers, “if I do not usurp myself, I am”; when he’s exposed for the first time to the World State, he cries out “O brave new world.” Empowered by Shakespeare’s language and moral vision, John resists the World State’s offer of limitless comfort. He spends himself in ultimately futile conflict with the system, claiming his “right to be unhappy.”

While Brave New World is often discussed for its reflections upon statism, bioethics, and technology, I have come to feel that issues with language form the heart of the book. The debased residents of Huxley’s World State speak a language of propaganda, euphemism, jargon, and babble. Their signature form of language is the slogan, of which they have many, regularly repeated: “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today,” “When the individual feels, the community reels,” “Everybody’s happy nowadays.” Along with the slogans, citizens of the World State speak a generally childish and attenuated language, in which elemental concepts like family relationships or human emotions are replaced with juvenile chatter and inhuman jargon. A sexually desirable woman is referred to as “pneumatic”; religious leaders bear the title “Arch-Community Songster”; participants in ritualized group sex chant “Orgy-porgy, orgy-porgy.”

With great precision and no small measure of humor, Huxley delineates the contrast between this empty language and John’s speech, derived from his knowledge of Shakespeare. Like George Orwell’s 1984, to which it is often compared, Brave New World becomes a warning about how the abuse of language leads to an abuse of people. Unlike 1984, however, the empty language of Brave New World is not imposed by a domineering government, but arises from the desires of the people themselves. Accordingly, the book indicts us in our own misuse of speech.

As with any use of empty words, the language spoken by the citizens of the World State diminishes their reality. Huxley highlights this attenuation especially in the character of Helmholtz Watson, an “emotional engineer” or “propaganda technician,” tasked with coining the slogans that shape the language of the World State. Helmholtz is, in other words, one of the most advanced users of language in the World State. Just so, he feels the insufficiency of the speech he has available. Ruminating over his work with his friend Bernard, he comments: “I’m thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it—only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the power.” Helmholtz has a gift for coining a pithy phrase, “the sort of words that suddenly make you jump,” but the only subject matter his society gives him to write about is banal, putting a hard limit on the power his words can exercise. He comments: “It’s not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.” In fact, though, even Helmholtz’s way of describing the language he’s looking for is insufficient. What he’s looking for is a concept of poetry, but the best he can do is to describe powerful language lamely as “X-rayish.” When John introduces him to true poetry in the form of Romeo and Juliet, he can’t appreciate it: his experience in the contracepted, deracinated World State leaves him unable to understand the tragedy of Juliet’s situation. He laughs, “Who’s going to get excited about a boy having a girl or not having her?”

Eventually, Helmholtz will attempt his own poetry, an act of great courage that will get him exiled as a threat to social stability. The poem includes some vivid language depicting loneliness:

Midnight in the City
Flutes in a vacuum,
Shut lips, sleeping faces,
Every stopped machine,
The dumb and littered places
Where crowds have been: …

And yet quickly the poem’s attempt at a poignant note of sadness descends to crass absurdity:

Absence, say, of Susan’s,
Absence of Egeria’s
Arms and respective bosoms,
Lips and, ah, posteriors,
Slowly form a presence;
Whose? and, I ask, of what
So absurd an essence,
That something, which is not,
Nevertheless should populate
Empty night more solidly
Than that with which we copulate,
Why should it seem so squalidly?

For all his desire to exercise his powers of language, ultimately Helmholtz lacks the substance to write with power and beauty. His culture of empty words has left him bereft of this capacity. His world is not large enough to produce a language of true beauty and power. The empty language of the World State thus leaves its citizens diminished in their experience, able to think only in superficialities.

Another of Huxley’s central characters, the “pneumatic” young woman Lenina Crowne, provides the best illustration of another pernicious function of empty words, their tendency to erode virtue. Throughout the book, Lenina is the most consistent parrot of the slogans composed by people like Helmholtz. Despite this comfort with the principles of the World State, Lenina finds herself powerfully attracted to the outsider, John. Although he reciprocates the attraction, their differing expectations around relationships and sexuality cause problems: Lenina is accustomed to the free love culture of the World State, while John has learned from Shakespeare the ideal of chastity. For a while, largely due to John’s reticence, their relationship stalls, as Lenina experiences mounting sexual frustration, an experience she’s never had before. Finally she gets John alone. She proceeds with his seduction as she knows how: she whips off her clothes and almost literally throws herself at him. John resists in words drawn from The Tempest: “ ‘The murkiest den, the most opportune place,’ (the voice of conscience thundered poetically), ‘the strongest suggestion our worser genius can, shall never melt mine honour into lust. Never, never!’ he resolved.” And yet Lenina “too had poetry at her command, knew words that sang and were spells and beat drums.” Her poetry is the empty slogans of the World State, spurring her toward unfettered lust: “ ‘Hug me till you drug me, honey,’ ” she sings, “ ‘kiss me till I’m in a coma. Hug me, honey, snuggly…’ ” Thus Lenina’s vapid language tends toward a lack of restraint even as John’s Shakespearean diction forms his conscience.

It might be tempting to describe these two different systems of language according to something like an idea of cultural difference: John’s language encodes one set of values, Lenina’s another. But in fact the difference is more fundamental than that. The emptiness and childishness of Lenina’s language makes it inimical to virtues like temperance or prudence. Her vocabulary employs the crudest metaphors and simplest language, with no words over a single syllable and no concepts that require even a modicum of thought. Similarly, the slogans’ sentence style operates using the most basic and immediate imperative sentence structures, without any complex relationships between ideas. To speak of self-control or thoughtfulness using a vocabulary like hers or the simple rhythmic sentence structures she employs would be difficult if not impossible—the very form of the language enacts a lack of restraint. In contrast, John’s quote from The Tempest requires the exercise of the mind to understand the significance of images like the “murky den” or concepts like one’s “genius.” Moreover, the sentence employs a subordinating sentence structure, in which the primary verb (“melt”) arrives only at the very end of the thought. As such, the form of the sentence models control, demanding sustained attention and care from writer and reader to grasp the meaning. We therefore can’t simply say that different languages inculcate different values. A language defined by emptiness can only tend toward a certain kind of values, those that undermine any notion of virtue whatsoever. Such is Lenina’s empty language, in stark contrast with the virtue-forming language of Shakespeare, spoken by John.

Ultimately, John’s story demonstrates how empty words crowd out substance and space for silence. As the book winds to its conclusion, John goes looking for solitude, settling in an abandoned lighthouse between two helicopter paths, like a hermit saying his orisons while encamped on a highway median. There he tries “to remember…unceasingly to make amends” for the “civilized” depravity of the World State. He works and prays, and when his labors and ruminations fail to end his sensual memories of Lenina, he chastises his body with thorns and a whip. For all his efforts at an eremitic lifestyle, at silence and solitude, John is rewarded by the World State with a media frenzy. His strange behavior, and especially his self-abuse, provokes the curiosity of the masses, and he’s quickly the subject of a documentary (“The Savage of Surrey”), despite his violent attempts to repel the videographers. Thus Huxley anticipates how modern media can get grist for the mill even from a rejection of its standards, anticipating the tendency of modern social media to assimilate even anti-modern ideas into its technological and entertainment regime. (“Like and subscribe for more ideas about traditional living! Stay tuned to our YouTube channel for all the latest on disconnecting from technology and getting back to the land!”) Accordingly, John’s pursuit of the silence that would ground a true and lively language rapidly devolves toward the babble and jargon of the World State, his silent meditation pierced by urging cries of “orgy-porgy.”

Huxley’s Brave New World thus depicts the consequences of empty words as contaminants in the ecosystem of our language, diminishing our reality, eroding our values, and banishing quiet. 

If these are some of the effects of empty language, we have yet to say enough about their causes—what brings this empty language into being. I want to conclude this essay by noting one of the sources of empty language in Huxley’s book, an artificial voice. Like many of Huxley’s other ideas, if anyone found such an idea outlandish in the 1930’s, we surely can do so no longer. And as in Brave New World, our new producers of artificial language pollute the garden of our language with empty words.

In almost his last act before self-imposed exile, John attempts to persuade a crowd of World State workers not to take their daily allotment of drugs. Though John “had never spoken in public before, and found it very difficult to express what he wanted to say,” eventually “rage” makes him “fluent.” His fluency, however, tends not toward Shakespearean diction but emphatic repetition and sentence fragments. He howls at the crowd: “‘Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking. … Yes, puking. … Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are? … Don’t you? … Very well then…I’ll teach you; I’ll make you be free whether you want to or not.’” Not exactly inspiring stuff. In fact, though Huxley describes John as fluent, his language has broken down as he struggles to communicate with an audience that cannot comprehend even the fundamental concepts (freedom, adulthood) he employs. Driven to desperation by his failure to communicate, John turns to action and begins destroying the drugs, inciting a riot as his audience attacks him for stripping them of their soporifics.

How the World State quells the riot is instructive. No jack-booted thugs, billy clubs, or tear gas here. Instead, the riot police pump in clouds of the same drug the crowd had been about to receive, reducing them to happily blubbering embraces. And through the clouds of happy gas comes

the Voice of Reason, the Voice of Good Feeling. The sound-track roll was unwinding itself in Synthetic Anti-Riot Speech Number Two (Medium Strength). Straight from the depths of a non-existent heart, “My friends, my friends!” said the Voice so pathetically, with a note of such infinitely tender reproach that, behind their gas masks, even the policemen’s eyes were momentarily dimmed with tears, “what is the meaning of this? Why aren’t you all being happy and good together? Happy and good,” the Voice repeated. “At peace, at peace.” It trembled, sank into a whisper and momentarily expired. “Oh, I do want you to be happy,” it began, with a yearning earnestness. “I do so want you to be good! Please, please be good and…”

These comments represent the epitome of the language practices of the World State: they are as empty, as sloganized, and as infantilizing as can be. The Voice speaks in the pure form of persuasion with no content. Nothing it says carries any real meaning—not simply because its statements are pure emotional appeal with no substance, but because there is no speaking subject behind the words. The statement “I do want you to be happy,” in particular, means nothing because there is no “I” to want any such thing. Accordingly, the comments of the Voice aren’t language in the typical sense of the term, a form of communication. They are more akin to the laughing gas of the police than to any real human speech—they are pure sensation, a whiff of mood without a whiff of meaning.

The Voice’s comments, of course, share their repetitive and essentially uncommunicative nature with John’s argument. However, John’s appeal represents an attempt (if a failed one) to appeal to the minds of his audience. They fail due to John’s human weakness and no other cause. The artificial words of the Voice, of course, succeed—but they do so by treating the audience almost as if they are robots themselves, pure stimulus-and-response automata. The language practices of the World State thus have rendered its citizens only responsive to a simplified form of language. They communicate like robots, and so only a robot can effectively communicate to them.

In a talk with the tongue-in-cheek title “How to Preach to Robots,” the theologian Kirsten Sanders has pointed out that automatic language-processing tools like smart speakers require us to simplify our speech. We adapt our speech to make sure that the voice recognition technology doesn’t misunderstand us. Sanders comments:

But do you see that part of the problem here is that you, a person, are talking to a machine? And that in order to solve this problem you begin to talk in a way the machine would understand—as if you were a computer, more than as if it were a human.

You talk to Siri as if you were a computer, not as if she were a human. So in communicating with a machine, you make yourself into one.

The anti-riot Voice demonstrates that Huxley’s World State is a whole civilization habituated to talking not with one another, but with machines. Here, then, is one of the primary roots of their empty language: words that are adapted to the comprehension of robots.

Reading Brave New World ought to suggest to us that if we speak to robots in a way they understand, we risk filling language, our home, with empty words. Language generated by an algorithm cannot help but be empty, because it lacks a speaking subject to intend it, like the artificial Voice of Huxley’s novel. Whatever meaning such language receives will be assigned to it interpretively and second-hand by human beings. When we generate prose from ChatGPT or another large language model, we produce words that are only potentially meaningful as we choose to give them meaning, because no person has spoken them to give them meaning at the start. Anyone who uses such a tool will likely assign secondary meaning to the words produced, and yet in so doing that person will have come to think of those terms as empty containers for meaning. The words will not be alive in themselves, but mass produced, dead objects which the audience consents to give meaning in the absence of a speaker having invested them with that meaning from the outset. A world of automatically generated language thus undermines the human liveliness of speech. A language dominated by automatic text generation is no longer an ecosystem, but a factory floor.

A language reliant upon automatically generated text will thus be a place increasingly infested with empty words. If words are dead objects rather than living thoughts, and our language something mechanically contrived, then values like particularity, accountability, and quiet no longer obtain. Mechanically generated words pile up heedlessly and endlessly, like the infinite scroll of the internet, as the writer Charlie Warzel has observed. Why search thoughtfully for the exact right word when more can be generated with the press of a button? Why stand by your words when they have been generated by an app? When will we ever find silence if a sleepless robot stands always ready to generate ever more words?

We must reject the tendency to turn our language into a factory floor, and should instead cultivate the garden of speech. We must eschew empty words, and seek after lively ones. We must refuse to turn our language over to robots and speak as and for human beings.

To do so will require us to forgo the use of the automated tools that are industrializing our language—to be new Luddites of language. Such a forswearing will come at a cost, because it is entirely possible that, as in Brave New World, we will find ourselves outclassed in persuasion by synthetic voices. But it will be worth the cost if we can preserve in the garden of our language some corner free of empty words.