Last updated on 6 June 2025
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No matter what people tell. you, words and ideas can change the world.
-Robin Williams
Words are not things. They don’t exist in the world like, say, a rock or a chair or a person.
One of my favorite moments from college is being introduced to the idea that words are symbols. This blew me away, because, like a lot of my fellow students, I took for granted that words are the things they describe.
The concept comes from the Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybyski who famously wrote the phrase, “the map is not the territory.” It was also popularized by the writer–and later U.S. Senator–S.I, Hayakawa in his book, Language in Thought and Action, a book for which I’m grateful my English professor introduced me.
Have you ever stopped to think how many words you read and hear everyday? It has to be up there with the National Debt.
We are assaulted daily by words seen and heard on billboards and packaging and in Target and social media and emails and that annoying woman talking too loudly on her phone while she waits in line to get her double-half-cap-with-oat milk-no-foam and two Splendas.
I think about words the way teen-age boys think about sex: A lot.
I’ve always been fascinated by words. I think about words the way teen-age boys think about sex: A lot. I’m constantly weighing the right words to express my ideas, feelings, and opinions. Sometimes I’m dead serious about my words. Other times I’m just making shit up to make someone laugh (or because I have no idea what I’m talking about).
One place I try to be intentional is when I write. The litmus test is whether I believe what I write contributes to the Universal dialogue. If I don’t see how my words add something than just more noise to a landscape that already is too loud, I don’t write. Then again, some of you might think I’m failing my own test.
There should be required education for email because I’m sure NO ONE thinks when they write emails. Maybe that’s because they don’t believe anyone really reads them. (I do.)
One of the best words I ever heard comes from my former step-nephew. As a youngster, he and his younger sister invented words. His best: DIABARNACLE. I don’t know exactly what it means. Perhaps it is his version of DIABOLICAL. Nevertheless, I know it meant exactly what he thought it did. The word has panache, a quality that distinguishes it from others even as combination of unrelated words.
Have you ever had a conversation with someone and been on completely different pages regarding the meaning of the conversation? It’s all because of words.
Words are powerful. Words can wound or they can lift up. The hardest seven words I ever heard were from my former wife when she ended our marriage. Words can be spit out like venom. I’ve heard and read words of pain. Words of spite. Words of immense sadness. Words of such intense grace they made me weep.
This, from Paolo Coehlo’s The Alchemist, for example:
“When he looked into her dark eyes, and saw that her lips were poised between a laugh and silence, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke—the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love.”
Put together in the right way, words express the highest ideals, the grandest love, the most beautiful emotion, even the sublime. Scrambled into a word salad, they can confuse and obfuscate and demean.
Am I wrong when I say that comedians do it best? Standup comedian Kathleen Madigan (one of her earliest shows here: Kathleen Madigan on Comedy Central) has had me so bent in two that my sides ached. And there’s a scene from Adam Sandler’s Grown Ups 2 that left me unable to breathe I was laughing so hard. Here it is just in case your funny bone is the same as mine: Grown Ups 2 Bus Scene
How many times have you heard someone sing lyrics to whatever was in your heart? How do they do that?
And songwriters. How many times have you heard someone sing lyrics to whatever was in your heart? How do they do that? I’ve been accused of a level of weirdness for preferring songs without lyrics, aka instrumental music, but here’s one that has grabbed me lately: Romany Gilmour: Between Two Points
Words can harm. Our own words can damage us. The chatter in our heads that passes for thinking can be the most effective hammer to our self-esteem. Words can beat down. Taken to heart, some words can rescue.
Think about “love” versus “fuck.” Inflection aside, I’m sure a different set of notions arise when you say, for example “I love you” or “I love your eyes” or “I love this pizza” compared to when you say “fuck you” or “fuck this” or even “I love this fucking pizza.”
Sometimes the best words are the ones unsaid.
We admire those who are careful and eloquent with their words. Shakespeare, Hemingway, Socrates, Rushdie, Alcott, Oliver, Coehlo, Murakami and Towles come to mind. Then there are those whose use words like weapons or who, like Donald Trump, spew them like diarrhea, leaving a mess for us to make sense of. Sometimes I think people like Trump should be required to have a license to speak. After so many misused or uninterpretable combinations of words, they get a ticket with a hefty fine that can’t be overturned by the Supreme Court. With good use and a demonstrated proper love of words for a time, full use could be restored. Think how quiet the world would be. As a multiple repeat offender Donald Trump wouldn’t be able to speak ever again.
Have you ever known someone who rushes through words like they are speed dating at a buffet?
They grab whatever words come to mind and without filter dump them onto our plates, piling them into a heap of bullshit that threatens to topple onto the floor. (speaking of bullshit, check out that sentence).
Have you ever known someone who rushes through words like they are speed dating at a buffet?
Do you ever wonder how they breathe? I wonder if they ever pause long enough to parse their words–they don’t–so they have even the slightest idea what they are saying. I bet if you took a radar gun to their mouths they’s be doing 90 in a 45. Word ticket for sure.
One of the professors in college I admired most was a guy named Flip De Luca. During his journalism class lectures, Flip would pause between sentences, looking up at the ceiling as he did. The breaks would seem interminable, lasting perhaps a minute or two. I sometimes wondered if there was a bucket with the perfect supply of words for whatever situation Flip found himself in up there in the ceiling . I soon realized he was trusting himself to construct the next sentence, choosing his words carefully before deciding precisely what he wanted to say. And if we asked a question, he would pause with the same ceiling look before speaking his response.
Since then I have copied Flip’s approach many times and I’m sure it drives people nuts, or they think I’m nuts.
“Is he still there? or did he just zone out?”
Then again, you might think I’m overly generous with my words in my essays. You might be right. Perhaps it’s time to cut myself off.
Thanks for reading.
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Cover photo credit: Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash