Wielding Words

What is the greatest skill that a human can have? I think it’s the speech, i.e. the ability to speak and convey ideas, the skill to wield words and to make people move, which in turn makes the world move. Why do I say that?

I believe we human beings can be made to do a lot of things, if we are convinced to do it. It turns out to be the way to convince human, is through speech, since we haven’t worked out how to do telepathy. Jokes aside, we have been using our ability to speak to make others, or even ourselves, do things that initially we don’t want to. We use words to convince people that we love them, and make them love us in return. We give power to people through words, through promises. “I give you my word”. We also garner power through speech. Although most of us despise or at least liken politician to undesirable characteristics, we still put their ability to speak as skill, something that we wouldn’t mind to have.

In society, songs use words and is always full of play on words. One might say that songs nowadays have awful lyrics, but even if repititious phrase and scratchy lyrics that stuck in your head can drive you crazy, it still requires a certain kind of skill to create that pile of crap. Conversely in academia, a different skill is required to make an idea clear, through simple and precise words, which can also be used to obfuscate reader in trying to appear being smarter than they are (see what I did there?).

And stories. We human love stories and in what way, if not through words, that we tell stories. Pictures they say paint a thousand words, but a million words can always be used to tell a story. And if the words are not enough, the phrase ‘word fail me’, also tells a certain kind of story.

Thank you for reading these jumbles of words.