8. It mutates, evolves, and is alive… it is language

Hello friend, how are you? My dearest listeners, today I welcome you to this space of musing interruptus to go off on a veritable rant (communicate in an impassioned manner). I appreciate your listening and sharing your thoughts with me. Today, it mutates, evolves, and is alive… it is language. Language allows us to name ideas, people, and things. Objects come into existence through recognition (identification) when we name them. We create and destroy realities and perception with words. Needless to say (it is obvious), words matter. For a writer, words are everything. For a child, it is the difference between getting attention and getting exactly what he or she wants. Setting aside the matter of actually knowing what you want… knowing how to ask for it, is the most important thing. It’s not just a matter of assertiveness, but word selection. The words we choose to use indicate our ideological stance (belief), education and expertise or lack of expertise on certain topics, where we come from, maybe even where we are going. The way I see it, the words we use communicate much more than the idea or image of something; through words, we present elements of who we are. Naming things into existence, like stories, is an amazing phenomenon. It’s fantasy, something unreal that undeniably exists when we repeat or read the stories. Our parents named us. That name holds energy, hopes, and some might say, a part of our destiny. You may or may not like your name. I love mine, by the way. Some people prefer (like better) to change their name because it doesn’t become them (be suitable/appropriate). We are allowed to do this because we deserve to feel represented. Who we are, is all we really have. In practice, most of us discover ourselves through experience and reflection and struggle with social impositions. I wonder what type of world we would live in, if people were provided a safe space to discover themselves and were not forced to fit into molds. It’s revolution baby, the molds have been broken throughout history. It’s nice to be nice in a world which elicits (bring out, prompts) defensiveness; a place where we are ready to protect ourselves where the State cannot. Words matter. When something is named into existence, there is a better chance to create laws to defend and protect people and the environment, culture. Childhood and adolescence were not always a thing, much less protected… just ask the workers with less than 10 years of existence in factories during the Industrial Revolution (of course, this is not a thing of the past… enforcement of the law is another topic). Now we have the rights of the child and even concepts such as late adolescence… in your late twenties. The fact of the matter is, creating words that are better suited to a person, group, situation…  can result in rights, like human rights, labor rights, and the right to be who we discover we actually are. Doesn’t everyone deserve to be who they are? Language evolves with the discovery and understanding of our surroundings and ourselves. I like to think about the inventions that we have left behind, along with many words that have been slowly forgotten. I’ve never had a rolodex, my contacts are floating in a beautiful heavenly cloud, I think, and I have only used a fax machine once. I never called a flight attendant a stewardess. Picture shows and penny arcades are places I’m sure I will visit once I have my Delorean up and running (functional). The ice box in old movies and black and white shows had an actual block of ice...My refrigerator doesn’t need a block of ice, it gives me little cubes of ice that I use to cool my martini, shaken not stirred. VHS could stand for very horrendous streaming,  [...] What do you think about words? What are your favorite words? What are your least favorite words? I’m listening.