“It’s vital to connect.”
“We need churches to foster connection.”
“It’s all who you know. All about connections.”
We hear statements like these all the time. You understand what they’re getting at—the truth they intend to convey. But if you were talking with someone from a hundred years ago, they’d look at you funny and ask you to elaborate. Go back another hundred years, and they wouldn’t understand you at all. No one back then used the word “connect” in reference to individual personal relationships.
In 1760, connect meant “to join, to link, to unite, or to cohere.” That’s how Samuel Johnson defined it in his dictionary. An author might connect his reasons as he makes an argument. You could connect sentences, or objects in the physical world. Churches might connect by linking together as some kind of organization.
Then came the Industrial Revolution, and “connect” began its upward climb, mostly in scientific and construction contexts. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the word broke into the social sphere of personal relationships. And it was only in the 1990s that connecting with people became one of its dominant uses.
Words Create Worlds
Words fascinate me—maybe because I’m a writer but also because the words we turn to reveal the way we see the world. Words give us an interpretive lens on life. That’s why fluency in another language isn’t just about communicating your thoughts via strict translation; it’s the ability to inhabit a different world. It’s stepping into a different way of seeing. Words in different languages carry multiple shades of meaning.
It’s often said that “words create worlds.” Our imaginations get ignited by the words we use, and the connotations of a word or phrase open up new patterns of thinking, influencing us in ways we often don’t perceive.
We argue over words because words carry more than their dictionary definitions. When journalists abandoned the phrase “sex-change operation” for “gender-confirmation surgery,” they didn’t just tweak the terminology; they smuggled in an entire worldview about someone’s internal sense of gender and its correspondence to (or distance from) that person’s biological sex. The pronoun debate isn’t just about politeness or politics—it reveals a conflict of vision, opposing views of the world and the nature of humanity.
But beyond the headline-grabbing language battles, quieter shifts are happening all the time—subtle, unnoticed changes in how we describe reality. I’m more curious about the words and phrases we don’t fight over, the terms we’ve embraced quietly, the common sense we’ve never thought to question.
How Consumer Culture Shaped Our Speech
Consider how the American psyche is revealed in the way we apply consumerist language to areas far beyond transactions.
In Romania, for example (a culture not as dominated by Western free-market influences), no one says “I don’t buy that” when expressing skepticism toward another person’s argument. But in English, we think like consumers—so much so that we evaluate arguments in terms of “buying” what someone must be “selling.”
We talk about “the bottom line”—the important takeaway or fundamental analysis—outside financial contexts, or getting the most “bang for our buck” even when no transaction is involved in our effort or experience. These phrases slip in unnoticed, quietly shaping our vocabulary according to a vision of life as a marketplace. Consumer culture shapes how we speak, and then how we speak reinforces consumer habits of thinking.
But there’s another linguistic shift underway—one that might be even more significant. It’s the mechanistic way we describe ourselves in the digital era.
Rise of the Machine Metaphor
In A Web of Our Own Making, Antón Barba-Kay stacks example on top of example to show how we’ve absorbed digital and mechanical language into our self-descriptions. Read through his list below (with a few of my own added in), and you start to feel dizzy—like you’re seeing for the first time just how pervasive the phenomenon is. We talk about ourselves all the time as if we were machines.
- We say we “burn out” or “fire on all cylinders” like engines.
- After a busy season, we “crash” like an overheated computer.
- We talk about “pushing buttons” or describe our personalities as being “wired” a certain way.
- We’re “overloaded” like circuits, or kept “in the loop” like wires, or “plugged in” like a power cord.
- In relationships, we make “connections” or feel “connected” or “disconnected,” or try to stay “in sync” with someone else.
- We talk about “networking,” as if we’re computers and devices linked to each other.
- We “tune in” to others like a radio frequency, and after an intense experience, we need time to “process.”
- Sexual encounters are recast as “hooking up.”
- We need “validation,” just like software needs a key.
- Influencers promise ways to “upgrade” or “update” ourselves, or “level up” in life.
- We “store” and “retrieve” memories like hard drives.
- A creative person is praised for their “output” (“He’s a machine!” is supposedly a compliment).
- When overwhelmed, we say we don’t have any “bandwidth,” and when things go haywire, we need a “reboot.”
Barba-Kay writes, “This mechanization and digitalization of language expresses a changing practical self-understanding. It suggests, for one, that we are our brains (as opposed to our hearts or souls or selves) and that our brains are machines” (224).
Recovering a Fuller View of Ourselves
Words create worlds, and worlds influence words. The speed with which we’ve adopted machine language suggests that, in subtle ways, we now see ourselves in mechanistic terms. Whenever we adapt our language to the machine’s vocabulary, we can’t help but reimagine life in less-than-human categories.
But we aren’t computer-brains with bodies. We’re creatures—living, embodied, relational, and spiritual. The church’s calling in the years ahead will be to deliver prophetic words of warning and comfort—resisting reductionist views that strip us of our multidimensional humanity and calling people higher, to the full-orbed dignity of bearing God’s image.
We aren’t machines. We aren’t processing units. We aren’t minds in meat suits, waiting for the next software update. We’re image-bearers of the living God, created to know and enjoy him, destined for a glory and dignity that’s the envy of angels. If our future is royalty, our vocabulary shouldn’t sound like machinery.
If you would like my future articles sent to your email, as well as a curated list of books, podcasts, and helpful links I find online, enter your address.