THE PENULTIMATE POWER
11MAY08
I am the most powerful thing on Earth.
I can make you doubt everything good you ever knew about yourself.
I can make the blood drain from your face or run in shame to hide.
I can color your view of the world.
I can turn friends and family against you.
I can break even a well-guarded heart.
I can give your nemeses unspeakably potent ammunition with which to arrack you.
I can bend information so what you hear was not what was said.
I can make you wish you had never been born.
I can make you suicidal, doubtful or uncertain about what you knew to be true.
I can pierce the core of you, leaving you humiliated and hurt.
I can bring you to your knees where you once stood tall.
I am the main ingredient of a lie, a tool of evil, and a can challenge your reality.
I amW a natural outgrowth of people’s worst side into the medium of language and communication.
I can be used as soon as a person can talk.
I can carry the shame and pain of one generation into the next.
As long as humans are as they are, I will exist.
I am a mean and calculated word.
A child learns language by immersion. From the time s/he is born, s/he is associating meaning with objects and actions, and by the time s/he begins to learn to put together words into sentences describing these objects and actions, the meaning is attached to the word incidentally. Thus, a person’s reality is contained and expressed through words according to his/her earliest word definitions: people attempting to communicate about the same subject may be completely miscommunicate because of the meaning attached ass infants and toddlers to nouns and verbs (things and actions).
Most foreign language classes are taught by the method of word referral: one word refers to another. The vital step of attaching meaning to the word is overlooked. That is why young children can learn foreign languages so much more easily than adults.They are not learning by rote that the foreign word refers to a word they know-much like the learning of a synonym.They are attaching a word to a meaning, the meaning of a thing or an action, which may be in their personal vocabulary than someone else’s.
So, the power of a word is when it resonates with someone’s learned definitions, and the person whose words powerfully hurt, is in knowing what is consenually harmful and what is especially mean to say to that individual.And sometimes, as the adage says, the truth can hurt more than anything.
Galileo was threatened with death if he did not rescind his words that the earth revolves around the sun…and he did.But the idea lived on, with great potency and there is the one thing that is more durable than a word and more unforgettable than an experience: the idea.
In Victor Hugo’s observation,”Nothing can stop the force of an idea whose time has come.” Capsulizing and sharing ideas is one of the greatest works of words.
Nothing is “just words.” The way words are used is the most powerful force among human beings,
in writing, science, religion, politics and relationships.”Choose your words carefully” is sage advice.
