The Undeniable Power of Language-But Do We Know How to Use It, Even in Tweets

Thinner and thinner vocabularies among all segments of population are more prevalent every day--the consequences far-reaching hurting all aspects of our lives, from economic success to cultural intake and academic achievement. We are using on average only a few thousands words. Only a handful considering 320,000 definitions Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary contains. With all this abundance, there is no reason for our word deprivation.

Without paying too much attention, we are turning word-sterile. Simply picking up our word-berries is not enough any more. We have to start painting our words. They are the canvases of our thoughts. It is time for some brushwork.

In the mythological world of ancient Greece, a poet, not a priest, was a messenger from Gods. Odysseus killed the priest but not the poet. Untouchable was the mortal whom the Muses blessed. Orpheus sang: "With my song /... / I will charm the Lord of the Dead."

The New York project, "Poetry in Motion," designed to engage countless minds and hearts, made the subway a more humane place having introduced poetry into trains, as well as buses, a few years ago. Now, however, the project is slowly dying giving way to a more profitable advertising. The displayed poems touched and captivated our soul. We are all carrying the poet within us.

Our words are the mirror images of who we are. They are the puppets in our cartoons, begging for approval and for applause. Too often we leave them stranded on the deserted roads of lost imagination. Our word kingdom shouldn't be just a randomly chosen universe to get our point across.

There are many factors causing the infertility of our word orchard, one being that we are pronouncing words dead too soon.

Words are images colored with sound. In their harmonious coming together lies the promise of a siren's song. Though we can't always be Pavarotti's, we can learn to sing our word-arias a little better rewarding us all with a "Good Cheer" (as ancient Greeks named their Muse of Comedy).

Word-feasts in British Parliamentary debates have long become performances in their own right celebrating oratory times of by-gone eras. Cases won in our courts, not on their own merits but solely on the power of the words, are all the indisputable witnesses that language's main characteristic is its innate agenda (with its pool of thousands of policy-affirming words at disposal, an admirable force).

Poets, writers and advertisers have long learned how to sketch beautiful word images. Musicians and singers went one step further. They learned how to paint them with a color of music.

We have fallen in love with only a sentence-long or even shorter tweeting. It matters to us. So does text messaging. They come with words. When all is said and done, they are only worth as much as music and color they bring us.

The rap singers found the way to make even the crudest words appeal to millions. Surely we can do as well with much more alluring words.

There is no competition among words. There is only balance. Did rap musicians intuitively include this knowledge into the rap? It might partially have contributed to their success.

Emily Dickinson said it best in one of her poems: "A word is dead / When it is said, / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to live / That day."

Source: The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, LXXXIX,
Mythology, by Edith Hamilton (the story of Orpheus and Eurydice)