WHAT'S IN A WORD?
Words are the gene pool of our intellect. Like our biological genes, words contain within them a history of what went into their making and they contain the future in their expression of new combinations of thought and insight.
Given that our edge as a species lies in our ability to reason, you'd think that words would be treated with respect rather than the carelessness that has become so commonplace in our national dialogue.
Maybe that is what drives a writer to write, the appreciation of the value of words, an appreciation that fuels the passion to use words to dig into the past and to the make visible a future perhaps undreamt of until it took shape inside the writer's brain.
But it begins with a respect for words and the spaces between them, a sense of words as discrete bundles of intellectual energy that singly and collectively contain the accumulated wisdom of an entire species, from its earliest days until now.
What's in a word? Everything . . . and more.
January 10, 2010
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