by Leeuna Foster
Words are very useful to us as humans. Without them we would be reduced to drawing little pictures on cave walls. However, they should be used with caution, despite the fact that they have been around almost as long as the Bush Administration. Words can be dangerous when used haphazardly and without forethought.
Have you ever heard the adage, “The pen is mightier than the sword”? Did you ever hear about how in ancient times, King Arthur and his knights in armor would slay dragons by stabbing them in the kneecaps with fountain pens? I didn’t hear anything about it either, but it could have happened…I suppose.
On the other hand, there is the little ditty we learned as children about how “sticks and stones will break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”
I’m sorry, but that’s just wrong. Words can maim a person for life. In fact, words have been known to cause death in certain individuals, especially when they were followed by rifle fire.
Whoever said “but words can never hurt me” quite obviously was never engaged in a verbal slinging match. One of those knock-down drag-out word wars where you’re slapped upside the head by dangling participles, knocked unconscious by misplaced modifiers, and flailed by flying sentence fragments.
I used to know a man who was a five-star general in the war of words. He could fire adjectives and pronouns at me so fast I swear I think he used a machine gun. After many years of this I finally learned how to spell the word d-i-v-o-r-c-e.
And then there are those pesky grammar addicts that I like to refer to as “seasoned word warriors.” They choose to toss those million-dollar words around, when a good cheap two-cent word would work just as well. These big words weigh a ton. And when they hit you it’s like a boulder just crashed into your head but you can’t quite figure out what struck you.
For instance, someone screams at you and calls you a “sordid verminous quadruped.” Immediately, you run and grab your dictionary thinking up all kinds of good retorts to throw back at him just as soon as you find out what a sordid verminous quadruped really is. By the time you look it up and find out he just called you a dirty rat, or something similar, he has already left the scene and all those sharp words in your arsenal are now useless.
Don’t you just hate it when that happens? These people don’t play fair. At least “The General” only used one-syllable adjectives and pronouns. And most of them consisted of only three or four letters. Thankfully, I was able to retire from the verbal battlegrounds after 23 years of combat and a purple heart.
Hubby has never thrown a single word at me. His words are soft as feathers anyway and they would never sting or bruise. They sort of float around my head like butterflies, making me laugh out loud sometimes whenever I capture one of them. And maybe that’s the way it should be.
Maybe that’s why the dictionary was invented.
Words were made to be heard and not felt. To be spoken and not thrown. They should never be used to abuse. We shouldn’t throw sticks and stones either for that matter. Somebody could get an eye put out.
If you will excuse me now, I’m cleaning out my past and I still have a few old ugly adjectives I need to haul away to the trash. There are a few things that should never be recycled.
