When I ask my classes, “What is a cat?” inevitably the answer is, “Whatever someone says it is.” Not so long ago, every seventh grader knew what a cat was. Now, that certainty has evaporated into subjectivity. But after a few months of instruction in logic, a kind of mass awakening occurs: the class discovers that “truth is not consensus, but the convergence of the mind and reality.” That moment is a glimpse of what our Catholic Tradition teaches about language, and of what is at stake when words lose their grounding in reality.
“Cat” is not the eternally correct sound for the purring, sharp-clawed mouse predator curled up in the corner. Nor is it an arbitrary noise, infinitely malleable, determined by our desires and consent. Somewhere between those two errors of excess and defect is an elevated golden mean of what our Catholic Tradition teaches about language. Anyone raising and educating children today is submerged in the wreckage of both errors; grammar, rightly understood, is the remedy.
Before any grammar lesson can be taught, however, three preliminary questions must be answered: What is the origin of language? What is the nature of a word? And what is the purpose
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