Word

“Be careful what you say—you may have to eat your words.”

I don’t think so much about eating my words as about wearing them. When someone sees me, the words come back to haunt like a miasma around me. No matter how colourful my dress, bad words turn everything grey and muddy brown.

My favourite word in the English language is »language«. However, if you gave me a slightly larger set of words to choose from I might have more difficulty expressing a preference.

Without another word spoken on either side, the lodger took from his great trunk, a kind of temple, shining as of polished silver, and placed it carefully on the table.

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Words like winter snowflakes.

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 – Homer (c. 700 B.C.)
 – The Iliad, bk. III, l. 222

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There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.


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 – Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
 – The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain [1952], st. I

'Right again, quite right,' said Mr Swiveller, 'caution is the word, and caution is the act.'

Spaces define which letters go together to make up a word.

Think how much acceptance Mary showed when she said:

»Let it be done to me according to thy word.«

The word is powerless yet powerful. The word can be a mere 8 bits, or the flame that burns a city to the ground. Words sting, caress, re-assure, and destruct.

We become wordsmiths innately, learning language before we learn to walk or talk. And still, we continue our development, our love affair with words, until the day we die.

What I feel for you,
I can't put in words,
language won't hold
my desire.

»Therefore« is a word the poet must not know.

(Andre Gide)

A word has the power to define, to bind, to create, to destroy. Truely, a poet has power undreamt of by kings.

A man of words and not of deeds
Is like a garden full of weeds.

There is a purity in words that cannot be sullied by their use.