"Sticks and stones" endorses a dangerous falsehood

When I was seven or eight years old, I told on my younger sister for calling me names.

I can't remember what the names were now, but whatever they were didn't carry enough magnitude to save me from hitting up the time-out chair for three valuable minutes of my life.

Ironic that I should get in trouble for telling, but from my tattletale my mother gauged that I had smacked my younger sister in response, and this was the bigger "no-no."

I asked her what made my particular crime the more heinous, and she responded with a phrase I would immediately internalize for the next decade of my life: "Because, Fiona, sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can never hurt you!"

This is a phrase that many of us have heard and internalized during our early years, whether it be from a family member, a teacher, a rhyme book, a movie or my big man Barney himself.

It's widely accepted as a catchy little teaching device, and it serves some children well for a time by hardening an otherwise sensitive and vulnerable exterior.

The problem with it is that it isn't true. Like Santa Claus, it is a myth created by adults for children in order to give them something special to believe in.

Santa Claus allows children to believe in magic; the maxim in question allows them to believe that name calling is nothing to be scared of.

Neither myth carries any legitimacy in real life, which adults know. No one forgets to inform children that Santa is fictitious, but the name-calling shield always forgoes similar correction.

This wouldn't be problematic if it weren't dangerous - much more dangerous than any stick or stone that has been thrown in the last century (unless, of course, the "sticks" we are referring to here are dynamite and the "stones" are bombs, but that would push the intended meaning of the phrase a bit too far if you ask me).

"Names," or words used as weapons (as in "name-calling") are extremely harmful, and if our own life experiences by the pre-quarter-life age period of 18-21 haven't taught us that, then we have plenty of alternative evidence to examine from the lives of others.

If "names" were not actually able to hurt us, then it would be difficult to describe what it was that led Megan Meier to commit suicide in 2007 at the emotionally tumultuous age of only 13 years.

Learning that her emotions were not invincible to a mother (pretending to be her own daughter) using Myspace to name-call and threaten her was an experience she was incapable of recovering from.

If only she could have comfortably tattled before admitting defeat, instead of literally being what many media resources have since referred to as "bullied to death."

It would likewise be difficult to argue that the embarrassingly vast numbers of homosexual suicides taking place in increasing numbers right here in our dear land of the free were induced by sticks and stones.

Ironically, a line quoting Eliza Byrd (executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network) in CBS news read, "Policies [addressing this particular problem] have to name the problem in order to have an impact," because, of course, the correlation between words and reality is as direct as connections can be.

This is proven again by the fact that if words were really less harmful than actions, then Charles Manson should be immediately released from the prison within which he has resided for decades upon decades.

Because, as he so sanely informed the court, he did not kill a single human being with his own hands. He simply used appallingly persuasive tactics to convince others to do it.

Our justice system seems to agree with my negation of the "sticks and stones" phrase, though, and lets actual murderers run free while handing the man who had controlled them a big fat life sentence.

No Manson murders have occurred since. A miracle? No, a hypothesis confirmed.

And then there's the "n-word," need I elaborate further? From lynchings to suicides, this word is perhaps the most dangerous to exist in the English language, now and forever.

None of you, by the college level at which you stand, should need historical references and recent statistics to acknowledge the profound violence contained within that word.

The fact is, actions do not really "speak louder than words." In a country infested by contradictory ideologies leading to crimes of every degree, belief in such a statement would be negligence.

Words speak far, far louder than actions. They are the hidden criminals that our own ideologies force us to ignore. They are hiding behind every life taken, every bomb thrown and every drop of blood drawn.

They have more power than any God we've ever known. Yet we throw them around like they're harmless, and perhaps some of us really don't know that the opposite is true.

For those of you whose parents forgot to falsify the "sticks and stones" myth, consider this your confirmation: Names can, do and always have had the capacity to hurt us, with a more merciless intensity than we could have possibly imagined at an age so early that "sticks and stones" still seemed scary in comparison.