An interesting linguistic note I noticed recently while reading The Peace Book by Louise Diamond. Referring to civility (or the lack thereof) in public discourse, Ms. Diamond draws a contrast between debate and dialogue as two different modes of communication: the former adversarial and antagonistic, the latter respectful and constructive.
I understood the difference intuitively. But writers - especially in the peace movement, or do I just notice it more as a member of that movement? - can sometimes make somewhat arbitrary distinctions about certain words. So, being something of an amateur linguist, I decided to check into the etymology of the two words, to check if Ms. Diamond's vocabulary was appropriate.
It turns out the debate originally comes from the Old French verb debatre, which means "to beat, to batter". Dialogue, on the other hand, derives from the Greek dialogos, which consists of the Greek dyo "two" and logos, familiar to any Biblical scholar as "word" but here meaning "speech, discourse".
That's appropriate, especially given that our public discourse in this country – hell, in every country – is not usually referred to as political dialogue but, you guessed it, political debate. They say there’s nothing wrong with a little healthy debate; but if we take the word debate at face value – as do most of our public figures, seemingly – there’s nothing particularly healthy about it at all. Instead of coming together to talk, to engage in a constructive dialogue, our leaders seem bent on battering one another into submission. What we need is dialogue, a real conversation where the participants are more concerned about finding a solution than getting their way, where doing the right the thing means more than being right.
Maybe high schools should have speech and dialogue teams instead...
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