There once was a world--a long time ago when there was no printing press, no computers or newspapers or technology for instant communications.
Something extraordinary might happen a few miles away and nobody would find out about it for weeks!
And the details? Could you trust the details? After all, some schmuck who is barely articulate and poorly educated is simply blurting out his own impressions!
What a world of crap that would be!
So much of what we rely on as history and knowledge of the past may be little more than what's left of a truly pathetic world of inarticulate blatherings tossed from
numbskull to numbskull and finally written down!
How can we trust it?
We depend mostly on the fruits of Paleontology, archeology and science for our CONFIDENT assurances about the dim past.
Words, you see, have not only precise meanings.....they have weight and color and tone and texture and ......well.....painterly, elemental gravitas when carefully chosen.
There are subjects on JW-net that require a very precise and clear use of words, terms and defintions.
Unless you give YOUR definition the very first time you employ that term......you risk losing your audience or debating over nothing for pages and pages simply
because you failed to CLEARLY SAY what you meant when you said it.
Without precisely understanding how these words can be used... a world of communication problems await the use of them by people at odds.
Our thoughts are only as effective as the words we use to express them!
Think of a crime victim sitting in a police station with a sketch artist trying to articulate the appearance of a perpetrator.
A verbal language is being translated into a visual representation of an actually existing person.
In the same way that the sketch only represents the criminal to the extent it LOOKS LIKE him---so too, the words we use when we think, speak or write..... are sketches of our thoughts more or less accurate or inaccurate....depending on......our choice and the listener's understanding.
If you have a sparse vocabulary your expression will be sparse and your sketches will be black and white.
If you have a bounteous abundance of word choice from which to choose you will have a full color portrait to offer to the world when you speak.
Is this post ever going to end, you ask?
Yes.
One final thought.
If you read great books by great authors you are exposed to the style of word play and thought-painting which is facile, potent and exhilarating to read.
If you read flabby word piffle in magazines farted out by doltish hacks your sense of wonder will be deflated to a flat emptiness of grunts and gestures.
Your choice, really.
Your taste in matters literary reflect the magnitude of your intellectual reach. Stretch and it grows. And grows. And grows.
Challenge yourself.
Youtube is a great source of examples for debate and skilled wordplay by fine exemplars of perspicacity and wit.
I love to watch Christopher Hitchens whittle his opponents into splinters with his trenchant skewerings.
Spend a half hour with the debates in British Parliament and you'll toss rotten vegetables at our own politicians. Oh the grandeur and the stylish pluck!
If you don't respect the integrity of words your thoughts are crap and your time is wasted reasoning with and debating others.
That's the full tide on this one.