“Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” In my childhood days, kids often chanted that little verse to counter the nasty words other kids threw at them. In the adult world, of course, words can and do cause hurt. They can lead to every kind of harm imaginable from heartbreak to barroom brawls. Even in the world of professional sports, where actions speak louder than words, bad things can happen from what players say. Ask any baseball player who’s been ejected for complaining to the umpire or a football player whose trash-talking brought a 15-yard penalty to his team.

But while it’s true words can cause pain and problems, it’s equally true they can be used to solve problems. The discord that arose over the naming of a U.S. Navy submarine provides a case in point.

The story begins in the late 1970s, when the Navy began building Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarines. In 1981, in response to a request from Texas Senator John Tower, Navy officials proposed naming one of the submarines after Corpus Christi to recognize that city’s relationship with America’s armed forces.

That name did not go over well with a number of Catholic clergymen from Corpus Christi and elsewhere, who declared it was blasphemous to give a Latin phrase meaning the “body of Christ” to an instrument of war. The controversy spread outside of Texas when Mitch Snyder, a vocal activist for the homeless in Washington D.C., went on a hunger strike to protest the submarine’s proposed name. “Once you start calling nuclear weapons God, you strip away the last barrier between us and their usage,” Snyder declared.

For a while, there appeared to be no solution to the disagreement. The Navy would not drop its plans to name their submarine after Corpus Christi, Texas. For their part, the Catholic clergymen would not drop their protests, nor would Snyder end his hunger strike.

Enter President Ronald Reagan. (Whatever your feelings about the man’s politics, he was a masterful communicator.) Recognizing the submarine was being named for a city and not literally for the “body of Christ,” Reagan ordered the submarine to be named “City of Corpus Christi.” That satisfied the Navy, the Catholic leaders, and Mitch Snyder, who ended his fast after a staggering 63 days.

The solution here was simple and yet far reaching. Adding just two words to a name changed its meaning dramatically and ended a controversy that could have cost at least one man his life. In my next blog, I’ll look at another instance where the creative use of words resolved a problem.