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The Big IDEAS: What is power?

The Sacred Spell of Words

Power is language.

Emily Spear, who is Kiowa and Cheyenne, at a Kiowa Pow Wow in Oklahoma.Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Mr. Momaday is an author, poet and playwright.

This is the first essay in The Big Ideas, a special section of The Times’s philosophy series, The Stone, in which more than a dozen notable thinkers and writers — including Elena Ferrante, Cornel West, Yuval Harari, Gen. Wesley Clark and others — answer the question, “What is power?”


The term “power” is everywhere in our world. Thinking of it, the phrase “word inflation” comes to mind. Much of what we e​n​counter in print, on television and in advertising centers on the concept of power.

But what is that concept? What is power? The truth is that the word bears an impossible burden of interpretation. Definitions are myriad; the dictionary lists an unusual number of meanings. Surely power is what it is — that which enables us to influence, if not indeed determine, the course of our lives.

And it is a word.

Words are powerful. As a writer, my experience tells me that nothing is more powerful. Language, after all, is made of words.

Words are conceptual symbols; they have denotative and connotative properties. The word “power” denotes force, physical strength, resistance. But it connotes something more subtle: persuasion, suggestion, inspiration, security.

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Carnegie, Okla., home of the Kiowa tribe.Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Consider the words of Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”:

Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

We might be hard pressed to find words more charged with power to incite, to inflame, to affect violence and destruction. But there are, of course, other expressions of power in words.

They can be especially personal. They can touch our sensibilities in different and individual ways, perhaps because they have different associations for us. The word ​“Holocaust” frightens me because survivors of the Nazi death camps have told me of their suffering. Notwithstanding, the word is intrinsically powerful and disturbing.

The word “child” delights me; the word “love” confounds me; the word “God” mystifies me. I have lived my life under the spell of words; they have empowered my mind.

Words are sacred. I believe they are more sacred to children than they are to most of us. When I was first able to make my way in language, my Native American father, a member of the Kiowa tribe, told me stories from the Kiowa oral tradition. They transported me. They fascinated and thrilled me. They nourished my imagination. They nourished my soul. Indeed, nothing has meant more to me in fashioning my view of the world. I came to understand that story is the engine of language, and that words are the marrow of language.

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Language is a system of communication based upon sounds and symbols.Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Several years ago I was on a stage with the Kenyan paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey in Chicago. We were speaking on the subject of origins, specifically the origin of humans. Mr. Leakey argued that we became human when we became bipedal, and his argument was convincing. But I begged to differ: Surely we became human when we acquired language, a point of view I continue to hold.

Language is what separates our species from all others. It is, as we understand the term, a human invention, a system of communication based upon sounds and symbols​ ​ — words, spoken and written. The late scientist and writer Lewis Thomas, in his book, ​​“The Fragile Species, ​”​ speculates on the origin of language. People were living in caves, he wrote, and one day two communities came together. There came about a critical mass of children. The children played all day long, and at the end of that day we had language.

It seems incredible that a child should take possession of language at the age of 2 or 3, and yet it happens in the normal course of events. It happens, I suspect, because children love to play with words, and they are not afraid of them. Only in time do they come to know the spectrum of power in words, that they can wound as well as elate, promote war as well as peace, express hate as well as love.

In my tenure as a professor of English and American literature, it has been my good fortune to teach courses in Native American oral tradition. There is a formula in that tradition that goes: “In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken​. ​”

It may be that the essential power of language is realized by word-of-mouth expression. The oral tradition is inestimably older than writing, and it requires that we take words more seriously. One must not waste words. He must speak responsibly, he must listen carefully, and he must remember what is said.

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A Navajo formula to make an enemy peaceful advises to “put your feet down with pollen.”Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

There is a Navajo formula to make an enemy peaceful. It goes:

Put your feet down with pollen.

Put your hands down with pollen.

Put your head down with pollen.

Then your feet are pollen;

Your hands are pollen;

Your body is pollen;

Your mind is pollen;

Your voice is pollen.

The trai​l​ is beautiful.

Be still.

Now that is power.

N. Scott Momaday is an author, poet and playwright. He is the 2019 recipient of the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize. His novel, “House Made of Dawn,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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