"Our task is not suddenly to burst out into the dazzle of unadulterated truth
but laboriously to reshape an accurate and honest language
that will permit communication between people on all social levels,
instead of multiplying a Babel of esoteric and technical tongues
which isolate people in their specialities." Thomas Merton, Literary Essays, P. 272.
Whatever else our celebrity intoxicated, sound – byte obsessed, advertising dependent, txt diminished language could do with, it could do with laborious reshaping towards accuracy and honesty. Perhaps one aspect of Christian witness would be to live for a day or two in the light of Jesus' warning that every word we speak will have to be accounted for. And the criteria will not be what our language sells, but what it heals; not what it subverts, but what it builds; not how clever but how wise, and not how manipulative but how restorative.
And that's as true of our preaching and teaching theology, as it is of any other sphere, from markets to banks, from Parliament to Church, from family to friends. A recession of truthfulness in speech is just as damaging to the fabric of society as an economic downward spiral.
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