About Words

This time I am going to talk about something that I have never dared to write about before: language. I am aware that this topic is hardly ever discussed in newspaper articles and even less, among school newspapers. For that reason, today I am going to give language the space I think it deserves, since is the most shared ability among human beings, by just writing about it.

To me, language is more than a mere tool for communication. I believe that both spoken and written language are ways of expression as well as sources of knowledge. From the sentence I type to comment you pronounce we express some information or knowledge. Surprisingly, it does not matter if a statement corresponds to reality or only to the speaker’s point of view, it will always contain knowledge.

Words are the smallest unit of a sentence which carry meaning by themselves. However, they need to be grammatically interconnected for them to make sense as a statement. I believe in the necessity of using interconnected words when the purpose is to achieve efficiency in communication as well as in the idea of considering words as an independent unit with full meaning.

For instance, when I think about words I see them as meaningful concepts which we can compare, analyze, weight, observe, listen, create, express, communicate… without being actually conscious about it. And what proofs this mini ‘theory’ is the fact that humans have word-choice.

Every word I write comes from a previous word-selection process in which I choose the term that expresses the best the message I want to convey. For instance, I just decided to say ‘convey’ and not the term ‘transmit’, which could be considered as a synonym for having a similar meaning. However, there is something in the way I perceive words that makes me think about all my choices and eventually, decide the one I ‘like’ the most.

That is the main reason why I am such a slow writer. If I had the time, I would spent hours and hours to write a single sentence. Sometimes. I get so obsessed with the words that before I actually write them I need to make sure that I know the meaning and definition of all of them, so I avoid those which I consider irrelevant.

Words also have subjective weight according to the value I think they carry:

· Amor, people, mirror, Bharat: 2kgs

·Like, nice, stuff: 1/2kg

Just the word Bharat, for instance, has a huge history, etymology and value behind it-which I think is fascinating. I don’t expect people to appreciate the words the way I do, since not everyone weight words with the same scale. Moreover, people select their words differently to fulfill different purposes and from different perspectives. However, they all contain some knowledge.

And you, how much do you care about words?