The Power Of Words

A fitly spoken word is capable of evoking the most vivid of realizations and the most beautiful of epiphanies.  I have previously quoted Robert Southey: "It is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn."

It is reported that Ernest Hemingway made a bet with several writers that one could tell a full story with a beginning, middle and end in just six words.  They readily agreed to the bet, thinking such a claim impossible.  Hemingway proceeded to write on a napkin his story:

• For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

This anecdotal display of lexical conservatism is an adequate proponent of the idea that there is an unparalleled power in words.

1. Words can be created heavy, which burden the soul with sobriety.
2. They can be sharpened to pierce and pervade the very chasms within our chest seeping up into the reverberant echoes of our mind.
3. They can cauterize the verbally singed and conquer the irrevocably offended.
4. Words can stay the mind that wields a weapon and wield the weapon that stays the mind.

A well-placed word can remedy in a moment that which Hades himself has razed.
Why, then, are the verbose so often devoid of wit?  Quite simply for the following reason:

• The jaw of the prudent is so encumbered by the weight of his own words that it wearies him to add more when the choosing of his words was so selective as to engender conciseness.
• It is the buffoon who chooses words of such weightlessness as neither weary the activity of the tongue necessary to promote his trifling speech nor provide the hearers with sufficient substance to embrace them (i.e. words without enough matter to matter).

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson ably depicts the frailty of our dim comprehension of words in a very famous story of the 19th century in which one character invites another to take more of something, to which the second character replies:
        "I've had nothing yet...so I ca'n't take more."
Then a third party adds:
        "You mean you ca'n't take less...it's very easy to take more than nothing."
How fragile are the words which are meant be the solid form of our liquid thoughts!

The spoken word can fall away and disintegrate like a footprint upon the ocean, never to be heard again, but the written word can endure the ravaging blows of eternity.

It is with words as with money:

• They are to be stingily budgeted
• They ought to be used only to procure good or to impart charity

Little known facts about words:

1. Sad words are more meaningful than happy words.
2. Though immaterial, words have physical characteristics: hard, soft, sharp, dull, old, new, ugly, beautiful, even solid and brittle.
3. ALL of the value of a word is in the one who receives it, and the intention of the sender is of absolutely no import in the slightest.
4. The word is to communication what capitalism is to economy.  The former is the worst form of the latter - except for all others.

Words are worthless.  This fact is both the antonym and the synonym of the fact that words are priceless.