A colleague of mine once uttered these words. I don’t believe he intended them to become legendary, but within my circle of friends they most certainly are and, I think, rightly so.

What is a word anyway?

Words are abstract constructs. Their substance has no relevance to their meaning. By that I mean that a sound, letter, phoneme, morpheme or word has no intrinsic meaning attached to it save that which the human mind attributes to it. “Walk” could mean the same as “run”, but why doesn’t it? It’s because we have created a different meaning for each. As we grow up from childhood, we learn that different sounds have different meanings, and so we accept these sound-meaning relationships without question. When we learn a language, we are conditioned to associate certain sounds with certain meanings.

Some words are spelled and pronounced the same but can have many different meanings, for example, the word “bank”. How we differentiate contextual meanings with multi-meaning words is an on-going hot topic amongst linguists and lexicographers, but that’s for another post…

Although words are abstract constructs, the association between the sound of a letter or mixture of letters (words), has become entrenched in our understanding of words and how they are used in conjunction with each other to form meaningful sentences, which in turn help us to convey ideas and concepts, although the extent of how much we can convey meaning is extremely limited. This process forms the basis of all our written and oral communication.

Certain words, regardless of language, are similar in different languages.

How can this be? All languages are categorised into families and hence, have hereditary traits. For millennia, people have migrated from country to country, continent to continent. During this, cultures mingled and languages merged. There is no such thing as a pure race. We are all of each other.

Because of this migration, neighbouring cultures share similar language traits. The scale of this is huge. For example, some members of Siberian tribes crossed over the ancient land bridge between far Eastern Russia and Alaska and migrated to South America, and now some South American cultures share some language traits with those still spoken in Russia.

However, this epic fact doesn’t negate the fact that words are dodgy things. What does dodgy mean? Well, it can mean “deceiving”. We may not mean to deceive when we use words, but it is often an un-meant and un-desired side-effect, even when we think we have chosen our words with care. Like it or not, this is inevitable, so it means we have to take special care in choosing the words we use.

As I see it, every human being likes and deserves to be treated with decency. Isn’t this a basic human right? The words we use go a long way, and their impact is vastly underestimated by many people. We shouldn’t think just of how we think we would like to be spoken to, but, more importantly, how we think someone else would like to be spoken to. To achieve this demands supreme concentration and dedication. This one of the reasons why Gautama Buddha rated Right Speech as one of the most important things a human being must pay special attention to and try to master. Try it for just one day and you’ll soon see how difficult it is. You will feel a sense of achievement even in trying. But, persevere: you and those around you will benefit enormously. For my partial take on Right Speech see Part 2 of my article The Unfolding Script of Speech and Language.

One problem with words is that once we crystallise our thoughts into words, the subtleties of meaning become lost or distorted very easily. When we speak or write, how often are we happy that what we have communicated is what we were really thinking? Once we communicate via words, we are, to a degree, at the mercy of the listener or reader’s understanding and perception.

From my point of view, this goes right to the heart of the problem of language: language, written or spoken, plays second fiddle to thought. Thoughts are far superior in accuracy, potency and meaning compared to written or spoken language.

So how is all this relevant in our daily lives?

For most of us, not a day passes when we don’t use either the written word or spoken word. Imagine you had only 100 words (it may seem a lot, but it really isn’t) to use, either written or spoken, each day.

You’d soon learn to choose them pretty carefully.

“See it all, till tomorrow”