"Language cares"
About this Quote
A two-word sentence that lands like a rebuke: not to us, but to our casualness. Nemerov, a poet with a moralist’s patience and a technician’s ear, compresses an entire philosophy of craft into three syllables. “Language cares” flips the usual hierarchy. We like to imagine we are the ones steering meaning, choosing words like tools. Nemerov suggests the opposite: language has its own stubborn intelligence. It “cares” in the way a living system cares - it remembers usage, resists sloppy substitutions, snaps back when you force it into propaganda, cliché, or false precision.
The intent is partly artistic discipline. A poet’s job is to notice that synonyms aren’t interchangeable; each word drags a history, a register, a rhythm. That’s why the line is so bare. No decoration, no metaphor to hide behind. The form performs the claim: language doesn’t need extra help to matter.
The subtext is also political and ethical without sounding like a manifesto. If language “cares,” then our phrasing isn’t neutral. Euphemisms (“collateral damage”), managerial fog (“right-sizing”), and online irony that pretends nothing is serious all become failures of care, not just style. Nemerov wrote in a century saturated with mass media, Cold War doublespeak, and advertising’s cheerful coercion; “language cares” reads as a quiet resistance to the era’s professional misuse of words.
It works because it grants language agency, then dares the reader to live up to it. If language is already paying attention, the least we can do is stop speaking as if it isn’t.
The intent is partly artistic discipline. A poet’s job is to notice that synonyms aren’t interchangeable; each word drags a history, a register, a rhythm. That’s why the line is so bare. No decoration, no metaphor to hide behind. The form performs the claim: language doesn’t need extra help to matter.
The subtext is also political and ethical without sounding like a manifesto. If language “cares,” then our phrasing isn’t neutral. Euphemisms (“collateral damage”), managerial fog (“right-sizing”), and online irony that pretends nothing is serious all become failures of care, not just style. Nemerov wrote in a century saturated with mass media, Cold War doublespeak, and advertising’s cheerful coercion; “language cares” reads as a quiet resistance to the era’s professional misuse of words.
It works because it grants language agency, then dares the reader to live up to it. If language is already paying attention, the least we can do is stop speaking as if it isn’t.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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