The Right Words

By Bobby Neal Winters

When you are joining a couple of boards together, there are times when one of the boards sticks up a little bit higher than the other. We say that the board that is sticking up higher than the other is proud.  This is the classical meaning of pride: it sticks up just a bit higher than the rest.

If you are a joiner, what you do is to take your plane and shave the proud board down until it aligns with its partner.  Then everything is nice and even.

As speaking humans, words are our tools just as a plane is a tool to a joiner.  Instead of “speaking humans,” I was going to write “writers,” but every adult human being uses words as tools.  

I hate myself for what I am about to write. No, let me correct myself, I feel humbled for what I am about to write. And that is this: We need to be very, very careful in our use of words.

There are three words/phrases that are often used interchangeably.  I am of the opinion that those who are using these fragments of language believe in their hearts they all mean the same thing. 

No.

No, there are important differences.

What are these phrases?  Have I kept you in suspense long enough?  Okay, they are these:  Pride, Self-Esteem, and Self-Respect.

Consider the situation where someone is looking at a homeless person drunk in the gutter.  They see this person and ask, “Why don’t they have more pride?”

They don’t mean to ask that.  What they mean is, “Why doesn’t that person have more self-respect?”

Before you all go off on me, there are other questions that could be asked: What can I do to help?  What can be done to help? What is the best way to proceed with my life?

And there are all sorts of assumptions that are made in the question.

But that is what they mean to ask. They aren’t asking why the person isn't puffed-up, putting himself above others. They are asking why the person isn’t giving himself respect as a human being, as a child of God?

Respect is a call for mindfulness in the sense you really need to pay attention to something.  You respect a sharp knife; you take care when you are handling it so as not to cut yourself.  But you also keep it sharp and avoid abusing it when you work with it.

Respect is a good word.

But we can also get into trouble with the use of the word “respect.”  There is a persistent, and dare I say respectable, cohort of the human race that says, respect must be earned. It carries the sense that you save your respect for something better.

I think about this on and off.  I will think about it some more.

We now come to the phrase “self-esteem” because it is also problematic.  This is to say, it rubs some people the wrong way. In particular, the teaching of self-esteem in the public schools is considered suspect in some quarters.  Is too much self-esteem really healthy?  

I see why there are problems with this, but I also see the attraction of teaching self-esteem. That is, I see why some would say it is a good thing.

Maybe we are trying to get a word or two to do too much work.

The question--it seems to me--is less about the particular words, and more about the actions we take.

We need to look at ourselves to see who we really are. This may be the hardest part, and it might very well be spread over a period of years.  To do this, you have to look at yourself from a distance.  

This is hard. 

As Robert Burns said: “O wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as ithers see us!”

Then, like you were looking at something that has value but needs help, you go to work fixing it.

The phrase we often use in a situation like this is, “This needs a little love.”

That four-letter word is a bit over-burdened itself, but maybe it is the one I am looking for.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.