The World War of Words

Words are sym­bols. They are like lit­tle painted pic­tures. Each one has a vari­ety of mean­ings, but actu­ally carry very lit­tle mean­ing by them­selves. The word “child” can trig­ger the pic­ture of a small human being or a big human being that is act­ing imma­ture. The two pic­tures are very dif­fer­ent but use the same word. Words by them­selves carry about fifteen-percent of the total mean­ing of a sen­tence. Con­text car­ries the other eighty-five per­cent. The con­text has to do with the over­all sit­u­a­tions involved — rang­ing from imme­di­ate facts to tones of voice and inten­tions of both writer and reader.
Words can be very pow­er­ful. A child point­ing to a box of cereal, and on the verge of tears, can say “hun­gry” and get every­one in the room in motion. (Feed it before it cries!) On the other hand, you can chan­nel surf through a hun­dred options and hear almost noth­ing of any con­se­quence. An ocean of words with­out mean­ing have lit­tle to offer. For words to work, they have to be able to con­nect with an inner hunger. Jesus reminded us that we are more than sophis­ti­cated ani­mals: “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that pro­ceeds from the mouth of God.”
There is a dif­fer­ence between mere words and ulti­mate ones. There is a cer­tain res­o­nance to an inspired phrase. True lit­er­ary clas­sics have some­thing to say to each gen­er­a­tion. They are time­less. There is some sort of un-definable uni­ver­sal­ity about such works. They are works of art that never go out of style. Some­how they feed the soul, and there is no sub­sti­tute.
In the cur­rent world war of words — a polit­i­cal sea­son that seems to never end — it is good to find a quiet place to hear the words that truly mat­ter. Those words may be from your friends, your mate, or gig­gled by some lit­tle char­ac­ter in a restau­rant. Lis­ten to that which is worth hear­ing. Tune the rest out. Wars of words are never won.