When the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, spoke in an interview about philosophy and the ways in which language works, he probably wasn’t expecting it to make national headlines.

Williams’ new book, The Edge of Worlds, examines the meaning of language and words in discussions about god. Recently, he gave an in-depth, academic interview about the book to the Christian think-tank Theos. During a discussion about the difference between literal and metaphorical speech, he discussed the ideas of the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Williams said that when a child learns language, it also learns other ways of interacting – like interpreting gestures and facial expressions:

“Speaking is something we do. We can isolate it from the rest of what we do, but the fact is, speaking is one of the ways in which we are interacting with the world. It’s in some respects the most resourceful, the most surprising, the most generative of all the ways in which we interact with the world. But if you think that when a child learns language, he or she also learns gesture – coding and decoding gesture and facial expression. You couldn’t learn language without that.

“So when I say, with Merleau-Ponty, that words are practices, it’s reiterated to remind us that language is, after all, a way of interacting with the environment, not just a labelling process which would have no connection at all with the business of finding your way around. As I learn a language, I learn not only to identify objects, I learn how to interact with another speaker. We all know what happens when people don’t learn that, when they speak without a sense of the codes that are operating – the tone, the timbre, etc.

“I suppose that’s what panics people about, let’s say, a primary school teacher wearing the face veil. As a matter of fact I think that’s largely a misplaced anxiety, but I can see where it comes from. I’ve actually been in public discussions in Pakistan with women wearing full face veil, and you learn to read differently, it’s not that those codes don’t happen… but there’s a cultural obstacle to overcome.”

The comments were picked by the Telegraph and reprinted under the headline: “Let Muslim primary school teachers wear full-face veil in class – Rowan Williams”. The piece went on to say that Williams had reopened the debate about the face veil: “Former Archbishop of Canterbury says ‘panic’ about the niqab is ‘largely misplaced’ even if young children cannot see their teacher’s face.” Ukip promptly jumped on the bandwagon, and issued a statement condemning Williams as “a white middle-class trying to be politically correct and getting it completely wrong”.

Of course, this is a misrepresentation of one section of a long, theoretical discussion. In an editorial, the Guardian says that the furore is an example of the media’s “tendency to simplify and then to exaggerate”. It is certainly true that if complicated ideas can’t be discussed without being distorted, public discussion will be the poorer.