Blog 3499 – 06.02.2025
It’s Only Words…
According to Facebook people are upwards of seventy-percent more likely to look at pictures than to read words. And the news articles consumed by most people these days are YouTube videos or the like and print journalism seems to be waning while most folks seem to prefer to have the news read to them and even then in small snippets like bumper sticker slogans.
Podcasts are more popular than blogs, movies more popular than books, and the spoken word more than the written. I suppose that I am still old school preferring letters to short texts and emails. Some years ago I recall a certain CEO at a large tech company banning all inter-departmental emails forcing employees to speak to one another face to face or by voice calls to improve communication. We think we are communicating with our short texts and emails when we more often we are only contributing to misunderstanding and mis-communication.
Words still matter and though a picture may sometimes be worth a thousand words, a thousand well chosen word can still convey messages that are not only clearer and easier to understand but messages that can even be entertaining, enlightening, and encouraging, which is ever my goal as I strive to become better and more expert at choosing and using my words.
That reminds me of an expression often used parent to child while trying to teach them to better communicate. We say, “Use your words.” Words are symbols, representations of our thoughts, the pictures in our minds. My good friend Mike Dooley always ends his Notes From the Universe emails with his signature line: “Thoughts become things, choose the good ones.”
I believe that each and every one of us has the power of creation/manifestation and that it is by our thoughts, words, and deeds that we create or manifest the world around us. Words are important in that they help us to visualize and to organize the thoughts in our heads and to plan strategies for putting them into action.
A true education still is about more than pictures and numbers and requires us to learn to better choose and use our words. In conversation with my son Jay, one of the great joys of my life, on Saturday he was telling me about a short article that he had recently by a writer from the Civil War period and how that he had to look up several words in the dictionary. I remarked that people in those days had larger vocabularies to call on. I dare say that most people today would be and are hard pressed when anyone says to them, “Could you say that using different words.” We have been so programmed by our short attention spans, like children, to keep our words brief and concise, that we have largely lost the ability to communicate in challenging words that not only stretch the speaker but cause the listener to sometimes ask, “Just what did you mean by that? Could you say that using different words?”
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David James White
Its only words ~ Bee Gees ~ Lyrics
theencouragingword 