GRANDPA, WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT WORD IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE?

Grandpa, what is the most important word in the English language?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2006

The other day I was playing tennis with my eleven-year-old grandson. I sometimes have to pinch myself to realize this big strapping boy is only eleven because he is blond, blue-eyed, six foot one, wears a size fourteen shoe, and weighs nearly two hundred pounds. I, too, am blond, blue-eyed, and only three inches taller, but also wear a size fourteen shoe, but weigh about ten pounds less than he does. So, there are discrete genetic similarities as well as decades of separation.

The unfortunate thing is that it is easy to forget that he is a boy and not a man. Like his peers, he loves game boys, video games, Yu-Gi-Oh, and is lazy and insouciant like others his age. He is also bright especially in mathematics and problem solving games. He often uses me as a sounding board.

We were taking a break from our tennis, and after he toweled himself down, emptied a bottle of water, he said, “Grandpa, what is the most important word in the English language?” Now, from a more mature person, you might think that a trick question, but Ryan is not that kind of a boy. He is innocence personified, and I’ve never talked down to him.

I came back without hesitation, “Control.”

“Control? I thought you would say love. Your book was all about love, wasn’t it?” He was referring to IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL. True, the book was about my love of baseball, Bobby Witt, my parents, my siblings, the nuns at school, and my Irish heritage growing up in Clinton, Iowa during World War Two.

“Love is important,” I answered, “but love is a different thing in the context of the question you asked. We live in a mechanized society and you’re very much a product of that society, even more than your grandfather. You have your iPod, BlackBerry, your computer and computerized games, all your game boys. Just looking at the instructions to your Yu-Gi-Oh games is incomprehensible to me.

“Much as grandparents are somewhat concerned if not puzzled by such activities it is clear to me it takes a great deal of pondering, memorizing, classifying, categorizing, coordinating, and that magic word, 'controlling,'to master these electronic creatures.”

“But these are games, grandpa, fun to play. I don’t think about control, don’t know what you mean.”

“Let me put it another way. You asked me what was the most important word. I said control because if you’re not in control, let’s say of your game, then control is in charge of you.”

“I know that, but that’s not what you mean, is it?”

“No, not exactly. I was thinking in the larger context. You are a boy. You don’t drink, smoke, do drugs, but you do have a certain likeness for food, am I right?”

“Yes. I guess.”

“Would you say you are in control of food or is food in control of you?

He fidgeted, looked down, and said nothing.

“Can I ask you something else?”

“Yes.”

“Do you eat only when you’re hungry or do you eat whenever you think of food?”

He smiled. “Both.”

“That’s my point. Food is something you think about even when your body has no special need for it. Food is something that can fill the void when you’re tired, anxious, disappointed, or bored. You’re only eleven but food will probably be a challenge to your control when you’re my age. Now, as you keep growing taller, and with your metabolism being as such, you can be a veritable food-consuming-machine, and get away with it. But when you get my age, you need very little food to maintain your weight.

"On the other hand, there is good nutrition and bad nutrition. It is not only how much you eat, then, but what you eat. Of course, schools have pop and candy machines. This defeats balance and control, and makes matters more difficult for you. Then the school cafeterias serve junk food to make matters even worse.”

“What do you consider junk food?”

“Pizzas, French fries, all fried foods, and empty calories such as candy, cookies and cakes.”

“That’s because you don’t like those things.”

“Did you ever think that I don’t like these things because they are not good for me, and I’m in control?”

“You don’t care about food maybe, but look at your study. There is hardly a space where there aren’t books. Your house is a library.”

I started to laugh, and couldn’t stop. Oh my! It was a perfect, “gotcha!” Here I was lecturing him about control and one could say I was out of control in the buying and reading of books. Momentarily, my mind flashed back to when I was a boy, and starved for reading material at home while other students had libraries in theirs. It was true. I was out-of-control when it came to books. As far back as I could remember, I would skip a meal to justify the purchase of a book. I still have that same mentality.

“What’s so funny, grandpa?”

“You know your grandfather, don’t you?”

“Yes. I know my dad, too. He has the same thing with cars.”

Don’t we know it, I thought, only his out-of-control is a bit more expensive than mine, which doesn’t make mine any less indicative.

“Ryan,” I continued, “you don’t have to be of any certain age to get out-of-control. It can sneak up on you like a snake in the grass. Then there are the innocent that come into the world out-of-control because their mothers are drug addicts, have AIDS, or an assortment of fetus changing chemical dependencies.”

“Why is that?”

“Why is what?”

“Why are mothers like that?”

“Well, first of all, besides sneaking up on them, chances are they are in surroundings that encourage such dependencies and behaviors. For example, smokers and drinkers like to be around smokers and drinkers. It justifies their behavior when they do it to excess.”

“I’ve never seen you smoke or drink, and my parents don’t, do they?”

“No, but I would imagine they have a drink on social occasions. I don’t know if your father ever smoked. I know your mother smoked at one time.”

“Did you ever?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t smoke because my parents both smoked and I hated it, plus I was an athlete and could justify not smoking. I never drank because I never wanted to be out-of-control.”

“But didn’t your friends smoke and drink?”

“The short answer, Ryan, is that I grew up in an age when it was manly to smoke and drink. Boys couldn’t wait to be old enough to go to a bar and order a beer. They often snuck a cigarette as a sign of bravado. And practically all the girls I knew in college smoked. It was the in thing to do.”

“Yet you didn’t.”

“I said that was the short answer. The long answer was that I have never been particularly interested in what other people did or didn’t do. I saw my parents hacking the smoker’s cough, and I had enough uncles and aunts that imbibed too much and were different people when they did that I had no intentions of mimicking them.

“Imbibed?”

“Drank. Got drunk.”

“Oh.”

“You are growing up in a world out-of-control, where people are not content in shaming themselves; they want company. If you are in that kind of group, they will taunt you if you don’t drink or smoke or do drugs. And they will make fun of you behind your back until your ears burn.

“I was protected in my day because most grade school and high school athletes didn’t do those things because it wasn’t in and because it would hurt their performance. I don’t think you’re going to be an athlete despite your size. Chances are more likely you will be a scholar. Scholars aren’t type cast to look like you, which will perhaps double the scorn. In any case, your taunters are lucky. As strong as you are, you have your father’s temperament. God help anyone if you ever got mad because you have your father’s genetics and could crush them like a bug.”

Compliments are hard for Ryan to take. Abuse is more his normal fare. Boys his age (but half his size) use taunting as compensatory adjustment. So, it did not surprise me when he dodged my assessment with, “What do you mean by an out-of-control world?”

“I mean you are growing up in a mechanized world in which the mechanics are out-of-gear. And they are out-of-gear because they strive for perfection forgetting that everything is part of a single system. And if everything is working perfectly, then chances are the system isn't, and ours isn't.

"Systems research has shown that if everyone was perfect, and every gear in the system was working as well as it might, then society or the system would not behave as well as it could.”

His eyes glazed over. “I don’t understand.”

“Ryan, let me put it in terms of school work. Let us say that everyone in your class was striving for straight ‘A’s’ and that by some miracle everyone achieved straight ‘A’s’. Control theory would suggest that less learning was realized than was possible because the focus was on grades, or an artificial mechanism than on learning. This is counter to the way we are programmed to think but is essential to systems thinking.”

“Doesn’t that mean that grading is meaningless?”

“Ryan, you know it is meaningless. You don’t even have to ask the question. You have to comply because that is all we have to measure performance, but that doesn’t make it efficient or wise. The grading system is so archaic that courses are conducted to perform well in a series of academic achievement tests (FCAT’s, SAT’s, GRE’s, etc.).

"These tests classify students by arbitrary rankings. The tests are not about learning because students work for grades rather than learning, and for doing well on the tests rather than measuring their comprehension of the subject.

"Consequently, the more adept students fail to help the less skilled students because the system is one of competitive ranking rather than promoting general learning for all.

"No teacher is better than another student who has learned the material well. A competitive system is the opposite of control because each one is attempting to be as good as they can be, rather than working complementarily to make the system function as well as it might. It is a zero-sum game, meaning that if there are winners there must be losers; if there are ‘A’ students there must be ‘F’ students, and education should not work like that, nor any system for that matter.”

“But that’s the way it is.”

“I know. It is a control system out-of-control. That is my point. It mocks its intended function, which reminds me. There is a word I note in your games, ‘cybernetics,’ a word that you pronounce very easily but I wonder if you know what it means.”

“No.”

“Well, cybernetics is all about control theory, what I have just described. It is about the fact that our bodies, our automatic nervous systems, operate in such a way that no component operates at its maximum efficiency but in a complementary fashion with various other components. For example, if our hearts were operating at their maximum efficiency, they would increase our blood pressure and strain other components. The fact that there is so much stress in our lives, that many people burn the candle at both ends, drinking, smoking and eating too much, and not getting enough exercise or rest, creates this system’s strain, and its possible ultimate collapse. That is what a stroke or heart attack is all about.”

“But I’m still not clear on grades.”

“Well, continuing the analogy with cybernetics, if your focus is on grades, in doing well on the test, and everyone else’s focus is exclusively on that, the grades will materialize but little learning will take place because your curiosity, your wondering, your bridging the material being covered with what you already know and have experienced will be voided. I have known stupid ‘A’ students, and in my reading I have come across men who have changed our world who were not great students at all.”

“Who?”

“Albert Einstein and James Joyce; closer to your time, Steven Jobs and Bill Gates. Then there was Henry Ford and Thomas Edison who had practically no formal education at all. All of these people were learners, not knowers, and ‘A’ students are often simply knowers.

“Then are you saying it is not important to be smart?”

“I’m not saying that at all. Being smart and getting straight ‘A’s’ are not the same thing. I’m saying that it is important to have balance and to have balance, to be in control, you will not try to be smart at the expense of other things, such as growing socially, at learning about the world beyond your own narrow world, and in enjoying life in general, and being happy and healthy and wise.

“Wise?”

“Yes, a whole person is a functioning person. Such a person is self-directed, self-motivated, and most importantly of all, self-accepting. This makes the person a well-rounded person, who in turn is integrated into his community. The payoff is that when you are self-accepting you are tolerant of others as you find them. Then, anything is impossible.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Can you remember me saying that there is such a thing as athletic intelligence which differs from book-learning intelligence?”

“Yes.”

“Can you also remember me saying that it takes as much intelligence, however different, to be an NBA basketball player as it takes to be a nuclear physicist?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think I meant?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, the reason I said that is because a person who uses all his tools to become an effective athletic or nuclear physicist may do so at the expense of being an in-control-well rounded-human-being. Such driven people plan, direct, control, organize, manage, discipline, and drive themselves to a singular achievement. We applaud them for it and often make them celebrities. Yet, we are seemingly always surprised when they are found to be taking or selling drugs illicitly or being found guilty of some other socially unfavorable behavior.”

“Your point?”

“Control means that intellectual intelligence and athletic intelligence needs to be balanced with social intelligence and emotional intelligence if a person is to be functioning as well as he might. If one component of our intelligence gets all the attention at the expense of developing others, then the first moment of crisis, we fall apart. At the first disappointment, first rejection, first betrayal, or the first surprise, we’re going to have no reserve to put our system back on track. That’s what I mean.”

“Grandpa, if you are right, why are not more people in control, I mean, don’t others see things the same way you do?”

“Yes, others think as I do if all the books I read on the subject are any indication. But I don’t know how many people believe in living controlled lives.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Sometimes, as I know we are getting a little deep into this subject, it is easier to write books or preach as I’m doing here than to live a controlled life. We see many experts on control who have problems with control. Control is a very human phenomenon. A psychiatrist wrote a number of best selling books about living the controlled life when his own life was out-of-control. The typical view of excess is that medical science will ultimately rescue us from our out-of-control existence.”

“You don’t think much of medical science do you grandpa?”

“Well, I guess that’s fair to say. I think public health, public education of the dangers of certain excesses, and public sanitation has done more to improve health and reduce disease than medical science has.”

“What about these miraculous drugs?”

“Have you ever noticed that these miraculous drugs are trying to compensate for out-of-control lives? People have high cholesterol and plaque in their arteries from eating the wrong foods. They can’t breathe or function properly for drinking, smoking or doing drugs. Their teeth fall out, skin turns yellow, dries out, and wrinkles early, and they turn forty and look older than your grandfather.”

“I know some people like that.”

“I know you do. So do I. That’s what I mean. But the final reason I think control is so important is because there is one thing that God gave us, which separates us from all other creatures, and that is this magnificent brain. It is the psycho cybernetic connection to our body and its autonomous nervous system, where all these wonderful components either work together or don’t. This system works so miraculously and beautifully that I think we should remember it does that because we are paying attention, and when we pay attention we’re under control. And when we are under control we can accomplish things that we might not otherwise accomplish. That is why I think it is so important a word.”

Ryan didn’t say anything for a while. “Can I say something?”

“Grandpa, why do you talk to me like this whenever we’re playing tennis? I don’t understand a lot of it, and I don’t even know enough to disagree with you.”

“So, you feel like I’m badgering you? Well, I apologize. There’s a theory in psychology called ‘reaction formation,’ which is a defense mechanism. Mine is evident today. Before I came over, eating my lunch, I was watching the news and it was reported that a mother cut off the arms of her ten-month old baby. I turned the TV off, and sobbed like a baby myself until my eyes were dry. I don’t want to believe we are capable of such acts, and I came here today in that mood. I am sorry.”

“I still think the most important word is love, grandpa.”

I said, “Yes,” and that ended the break, and we went back to playing tennis.

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Dr. Fisher is an industrial-organization psychologist. Check his website for related articles: www.peripateticphilosopher.com.