All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
― Ernest Hemingway
It seems I’ve been writing quite a bit lately on the subject of map making. What is a map after all but a symbolic representation that tells us where we are. What then are words? Don’t we use words as a symbolic representation to describe where we are as well?
We abuse words even more than we abuse other mapping tools. One of the largest ways in which we abuse words is by assuming that everybody who we speak to uses the same meaning for each word that we do even when the evidence starts racking up that this is simply not the case. I have seen so many arguments that derived from people using the same word or words yet they both seemed to come from separate dictionaries. At least a few times when I’ve pointed this out to people rather than focus on establishing a common meaning for the term so that debate or discourse was even possible, the people involved focused on who was using the word ‘more correctly’ Being right had become more important than communication.
Still despite this problem, many people do communicate. Sometimes it is just with a hand offered or a smile exchanged but nothing is more beautiful than the sound of two people conversing in harmony.
Blessings, G
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Thought-provoking post! Much to the chagrin of “grammar police” and the ” guardians of so-called ‘rules and styles of writing’ “, language is constantly changing. Sometimes the rules have to change and bend because “wrong” grammar and word meanings have become so popular that they largely have become accepted. Literary “artists” often play with words, their spellings, their meanings and even make up new words as part of their creative play and provocations. Communication is about much more than words and grammar. Even written words create cognitive pictures and help to recall collective and individual memories in the reader(s); memories that include smells, emotions, tragedies and joys etc. Words are perhaps merely tools which first really come to life in a creative context.
Guarded Idyll by G A Rosenberg
Thought-provoking post! Much to the chagrin of “grammar police” and the ” guardians of so-called ‘rules and styles of writing’ “, language is constantly changing. Sometimes the rules have to change and bend because “wrong” grammar and word meanings have become so popular that they largely have become accepted. Literary “artists” often play with words, their spellings, their meanings and even make up new words as part of their creative play and provocations. Communication is about much more than words and grammar. Even written words create cognitive pictures and help to recall collective and individual memories in the reader(s); memories that include smells, emotions, tragedies and joys etc. Words are perhaps merely tools which first really come to life in a creative context.
YES. The danger comes when we forget this and assume that we all use the same words to mean the same things
YES!!! And it can only benefit a craftsman to learn the limits of their tools so that they can transcend them.
Thanks.