Mark Vernon - 26/09/2026

I was once investigated for blasphemy. Back in the late 1990s, I wrote something that a conservative Christian group objected to. There followed 18 months of enquiries by the police before the case was dropped. I breathed a sigh of relief. But the experience left me with a slightly jumpy sense of the power of words. They can get you into a lot of trouble.

Blasphemy is no longer a law in this country, but words clearly still matter. At the centre of many news stories are conflicts about words.
For instance, today is the European Day of Languages, a prompt from the Council of Europe to celebrate the multiple ways in which words are spoken across the continent. Which is good. But remembering that variety of languages is, of course, also to remember social tensions, global stresses and political trouble.

Another troubled word story concerns the dramatic drop in that enjoyment of words called reading. The decline is causing something of a moral panic.
Or again: there is the mix of threat and possibility promised by Large Language Models, the AIs that consume words even faster than electricity and water. The great minds behind the AIs regularly remark that they don’t quite know why the algorithms are working so well. My bet is that the power of words provides at least part of an answer.

For words have an extraordinary nature: they live, have a soul, you might say. Religious traditions are a great help here because they frequently stress that words are not just fancy forms of grunts and squeaks. Rather, they possess nothing less than divine qualities.

Christian theology majors on the Greek term, Logos - Logos meaning “word” in the maximal sense: a word that can not only describe something or communicate information but is an active spiritual force. The divine Logos lives in logic, dialogue, analogies. Its presence makes the activity of speaking and hearing pretty much miraculous. Right now, though miles apart, we are in a shared field of meaning that might transport us, cajole us, move us. And you thought you were just listening to the radio.

Words are also powerful when abused. That was the fear behind the old notion of blasphemy which resurfaces in contemporary, secular guise: speak certain words, weaponise them, and be accused, be condemned, be cancelled.

I’ve had a taste of such a hounding and certainly don’t advocate it. Rather, be more alert to the everyday magic we deploy with words. The awareness can make us wiser about the spirits active in our lives.