Le Mot Juste

Hello again!

Well, today's post was going to be a movie review; however, I decided to change directions when I came across this quote from CS Lewis:

"Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite."

In her book The Lively Art of Writing, "Grandmother Payne" (as we affectionately called her in my Composition II class) brings up the point of finding "Le Mot Juste": or, "the perfect word." This is the word that embodies exactly what you are trying to say. For instance, you wouldn't use the word "majestic" to describe a sparrow--you'd save it for something like an eagle.

Like Lewis says in the above quote, if you call a sparrow majestic, then what can an eagle be? Awe-inspiring? Well, another way of saying "awe-inspiring" is saying "awesome," but virtually anything nowadays is awesome, or amazing, or epic (I myself am guilty of this). Which brings me to an interesting point: the word awesome has been so overused that it now carries no more weight than the word nice (on which I could write an entirely different post). "Hey, how was your fishing trip?" "Oh, it was awesome! It was sunny and 75 degrees the entire time and the fish were biting anything you threw in the water, even my sister's toe!" Is that really what awesome means? Nice weather? Bite-happy fish? According to Dictionary.com, something is awesome when it inspires awe in you.

Psalms 99:1-3 says, "The Lord reigns; let the peoples tremble! He sits enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth quake! The Lord is great in Zion; he is exalted over all the peoples. Let them praise your great and awesome name! Holy is He!" (ESV, emphasis added) It is God and His Name that should be inspiring us with awe, not fish! To quote Lewis, "don't use a word too big for the subject."

And yet, God's name is probably the most ill-used name in America. You can hardly watch a movie without hearing "Oh my G*d" 3-50 times, or "G**d**n it" in PG-13 or R rated movies. Just take a walk through the local mall you'll hear it. For me, it's gotten so bad that the word "god" reminds me of a thing so boring, so commonplace, that it doesn't sound powerful enough when ascribed to the God. I have to constantly remind myself of His Greatness.

I'll end this post with a challenge: Look up verses about God's greatness, His majesty, His awesomeness. If you have a concordance in the back of your Bible, use that to find verses. To start with, look up and read Psalm 96. But don't just read it; learn from it. And while you read it, think of how amazing it is that God, THE God, who commands lightning (Job 38:35), is the same God who wants to know us personally, and for us to spend eternity with Him. Isn't that awesome?!