“Thy Speech bewrayeth[1] thee”
Matthew 26:73
Your grandmother and I were watching a cooking show on television last week and the lady demonstrating the recipe used the word (an inappropriate slang word) that your grandmother had not heard before. She asked me what it meant and I responded in medical terms that she understood.
She was shocked that anyone would use that word on the air. In our day it would have been bleeped out and more often than not, would not have even been aired.
The use of crude language indeed shows what kind of refinement a person has. Our language reveals our sensitivity to the spirit. When talking to the Lord or his son Jesus Christ we would be ashamed to use improper language or converse in anything but the most refined and dignified utterances.
I was brought up in a home where I never heard my parents swear or use crude language. This did not mean that I was not exposed to people who did. My classmates at school swore. The children and teenagers that I was around swore and used filthy language. I worked on my uncle Howard's ranch during the summer and some of his hired hands also swore and used inappropriate language. I did not feel comfortable around them. As a result I do not ever remember swearing or using crude language in front of my wife or children.
Each of you deserves to be in a clean environment, which you need to cultivate in your home and family.
George Bernard Shaw was an English playwright. He wrote a five act play entitled “Pygmalion”, later spawning a musical by Lehrner and Lowe, which we know as “My Fair Lady”.
The theme of both productions is that one can be taught to learn proper English and style of speech and thus become accepted in the higher and more socially acceptable levels of British society.
The point is that our speech betrays us as to our upbringing, our family values, and ultimately our spirituality.
When we were in Lander there were two brothers who were raised in southern Utah living there. They ran a successful business in Lander and were active in the church and both became leaders in the church and were good men, but when they opened their mouth to speak they showed their ignorance of the English language. The language was not polished or refined. The verb tense was almost always used inappropriately.
One of the most glaring to my ears was using “he done” instead of “he did”. These men would never reach the full potential that they were capable of, because of their inattention to the details of the language. It was not that they were not good people with testimonies of the Gospel, but that they could not express themselves as Professor Henry Higgins[2] would say, “ In language that is [not] painful to the ears.”
When I was in high school, I had a good friend in the same class by the name of John L. Frank. He was a brilliant young man and we used to see who could get the best grades on the tests. We had a study hall together. We both really didn't need time to get our homework done, so we went back to the library and looked up words we didn't know in the big Oxford English dictionary.
We would write them down with their different definitions and then quiz each other. We had a high school principal by the name of Wedge Thompson. He had a good vocabulary and we would listen to him and try to pick up words that we were unfamiliar with and write them down and look them up later.
We had a good English teacher by the name of Mrs. Miriam Tweed. She did not let us use improper grammar.
When I went to college, I had no trouble with my English courses and didn't have to relearn to extinguish bad habits, because I was taught well at home and at school.
Each of you must decide that you will not pick up the improper usage of the English grammar, but more than that, not let “That which cometh out of the mouth defile the man.”
Will any one be able to say of you, “Thy Speech bewrayeth thee”?
Love Grandpa
