Choice of Words: A Note on Gabrielle Giffords & The Tragedy in Arizona

I was in the middle of writing a column for PANK—or rather, the beginning. The idea came to me last night; I planned to use the cloistered downtime of a Saturday snowstorm to get the writing done. I went as far as the title—A Novel Gestates—and my Twitter timeline exploded with accounts of a shooting in Tucson, AZ. House Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) stood in front of a local grocery store, preparing to hold an event for her constituents. From there, the details were—and remain—sketchy: shots fired, people killed, a gunman taken into custody, the Congresswoman was rushed to Tucson’s University Medical Center, where she—at the time of this writing—continues to fight for her life.

As news outlets scrambled to find and report accurate information, Twitter—my portion of it, at least—was set aflame, not only by the seemingly instant outpouring of prayers and condolences for Rep. Giffords and the other victims involved, but by the shrunken links to a page on Sarah Palin’s PAC website; links that directed me to a graphic of the United States dotted with bulls eyes, twenty in all, “targeting” Congressional seats needing reclamation from the Democratic Party.

Courtesy of The Huffington Post

What followed for the next two hours was a barrage of blame aimed at Sarah Palin for inciting the shooting, for appearing careless in her choice of words. That phrase—choice of words—is one all writers, creative or otherwise, grapple with each and every day. The wrong word destroys a piece of writing, it erodes the alchemy that writing creates in the reader’s brain, sending the entire piece toppling over in a pile of scattered syllables and random punctuation marks. And that is, sadly though realistically, the best or, I should say, least troublesome outcome. In short, writers are lucky if the wrong word is a question of style, and nothing more, which leads to a relatively easy corrective measure: consulting the thesaurus, rewriting the sentence, or removing the word altogether.

The most extreme consequence of choosing the wrong word is a matter of the irrevocable: a friendship disappears, a defamation lawsuit is issued or—God forbid—something far more permanent and visceral is rendered as a suitable reaction. No more erroneous adage than this: sticks and stones break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Words have led to divorces and broken families, suicides, homicides, genocide, cross-country and cross-planet warfare; words (and far less) led to lynchings, to rape, to disenfranchisement, to lack of ownership of one’s own body and mind; “separate but equal” left an indelible pockmark on America; “don’t ask, don’t tell” turned soldiers into sexless automatons, committed to the protection of this nation, yet fearful of a simple expression: to love whom you choose.

For now, I’m turning the tragedy in Tucson—and its immediate, byte-sized aftermath—into a moment of reflection when it comes to my craft, the literary art I love and cherish in incalculable ways. I never thought about the power of my words, often relegating to self-deprecating humor as to how powerless they appear to me. As much as I want to invoke emotion into my readers, or instill them with information they may find relevant, I”â„¢m remembering the necessity of prudence.

In the weeks, months and years ahead, more truths will surface from today’s tragic events: the who, what, how and of course, why. It is far too soon to turn Gabrielle Giffords into a sounding post for America’s political landscape and its recent fascination with incendiary, and oft-times grotesque, rhetoric. Yet, I look at that graphic above, at its words, at the targets, and I think about Giffords’ husband, her family, the families of those either clinging onto life or of those who’ve already faded away. And I think of that phrase—choice of words—and begin to see it beyond the literal, the literary.