just words

They are just words.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

… empty words…

Words of Power

What are words? I like to think that they are clothes for ideas. And like clothes, they have their own fabric, colour, texture, weight, feel, … I love words for themselves. I love how just one word can conjure up a whole scenario – like ‘meadow’ makes me think of summer and fresh hay and sunshine and nature. And how a word can sound exactly like what it means: swamp. hiss. melodious. whine. cantankerous. I love how words can sound together, skipping and flowing, like they do in Dylan Thomas’ masterful handling: “It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.” And I love how words carry meaning and purpose and enable communication.

And it physically hurts me to read or have to write words that have been mangled and formalized and veiled and blurred and twisted and teased and stripped out of all cohesion, out of all meaning, out of all sincerity, out of all colour and beauty – to leave the reader with a dumbfound expression, trying to figure out what-the-hell that means.