Part 1 – The Words Themselves
When is the last time you thought about words? We speak them all day long. If we’re not speaking them, we’re thinking about them. We use them to express every emotion, every thought, but are we conscious of individual words? Words can spill out of our mouths if we are excited. Or they can come out all jumbled up if we think too much about what we want to say. Words are black and white, but they also have spirit—they can make you feel good, or bad. Words have power.
“Handle them carefully, for words have more power than atom bombs.” – Pearl Strachan Hurd
Politicians make speeches—they don’t dance to get their messages across. The doctor uses words to give us our diagnosis—he doesn’t play a game of charades with us so we can take a guess. We tell our waiter what we want to eat, we don’t just wait for him to bring us food. Our lawyer stands in front of the judge, pleading our case with words—not acrobatic movements. When our children are young, we tell them to ‘use their words.’
Our culture … our world uses words to communicate. If we don’t know the words, we can’t expect to communicate well. Now, that doesn’t mean people haven’t found other ways to communicate. Sign language, body language—both are certainly communication. But you still need to know the words.
If we know how, we can express our deepest feelings with words, or we can teach someone how to disarm a bomb or bake an angel food cake. We can speak words, write words, sing words, or sign words.
“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word.” – Emily Dickinson
Words give us instruction and direction. Words are good, bad, beautiful, ugly, soft, loud. For whatever reason, words are our chosen method of communication and boy do we like to communicate. There is a fluidity found in using words, we can shape ideas, we can incite a riot, we can bring a room to tears or we can put the very same words together in such a way that an audience will roar with laughter.
Words are flexible … one minute they mean one thing, the next minute they mean another thing. The dictionary is always changing.
There are scientific words, legal words, mathematical words, musical words, nautical words, and words specific to every job, calling, hobby, and religion. Getting a new job can mean learning a new vocabulary.
There are words that define the meaning and usage of the words we use. We call those definitions, punctuation, and grammar. The use of punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence. Comma’s have saved lives –
“Let’s eat, Grandpa!”
“Let’s eat Grandpa!”
In the dictionary, there are even weird little marks that tell us how to pronounce a word. Most of us don’t know what they mean except the symbols for long and short vowels.
Speaking of dictionary’s—how many are there? Well, it depends on what you mean by dictionary. There are several publishers of dictionaries. There are dictionaries with the standard words in them. You want to know what climate means? You’ll grab your Collegiate dictionary which is probably the one you have at home. There are Full dictionary’s—that’s the big huge book at the library. There are Reverse dictionaries. There are foreign word dictionaries. Ooooooorrrr … you can go online and look up climate in all the so-called normal dictionary’s (Oxford, Merriam-Webster) or you can use the Urban dictionary, the dictionary of Obscure Words, the Flip Dictionary, or the Dictionary of American Regional English or an astonishing number of children’s dictionaries … do you really care anymore about the meaning of climate?
The bottom line? There are many words we can use in order to talk about words! And we will in the coming weeks. What do you think about words? Are you a word person? Let me know in the comments below.
