Words have meaning.
This has been shown over and over and over again.
Heck, Shakespeare’s Hamlet used the word in response to Polonius’ question about what he was reading.
He was reading words. He wasn’t going to tell Polonius what those words were.
In what he was reading, Hamlet knew that the very words were not important. Because words get carried on the wave of other words, in a never-ending maelstrom. By impermanence, I mean lasting for a very short period of time.
Not unlike social media these days and the impermanence of the videos on social media, or reactions to events in the real world. Or the thoughts and prayers that have been forgotten before the reverberation of the event has finished.
Knee-jerk reaction, those thoughts and prayers.
Do you mean them in the moment? Absolutely.
Does the moment fly away? Yes.
However, the meaning of the words can have lasting impacts, even in the far future.
For example, it irks me to no end to hear that everyone is present AND accounted for, instead of the appropriate phrase present OR accounted for. The first means that everyone is present. To say AND accounted for is saying the same thing twice and no one has time for that. The second means that there are some people who are not present but we know where they are.
There are some no-no words that have lasting impacts too. I will not be going into them. But you know what they are.
We will never know the true impact of the words we use until we ask the person. Even then, they may prevaricate or say it doesn’t matter.
But it does, doesn’t it?
Be careful of the words that you use, they may be in the moment and gone, but still have a lasting impact for as long as the person hearing them remembers.
And for some of us, that is a long time indeed.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 