The Power of Words

studentsofenglish.blogspot.com/2006/01/muses.html

I don’t recommend that you spend fifteen minutes doing introspection because at the end of it all the only thing you will learn is you are not as awesome as you think. I’ve spent the last decade or so thinking that I have an overactive imagination and I prided myself in being able to out-imagine other people. Fifteen minutes of self-contemplation and all my pride is gone. I have a normal (okay, maybe just a notch above normal) imagination it turns out – everything else is borrowed from all the books I’ve read and the movies I’ve seen. The writers of the books I’ve read and the people behind the movies I watch have great imaginations. I simply have all their great visions in my head.

Words, they have a power. A good book or movie can help you see the world from a different angle. Words can clarify things that were always vague but words can also deconstruct. Eminem says that words are a mother[humper], they can be great, they can degrade or even worse, they can teach hate. One of the reasons Hitler was such a powerful character was because he had a way with words – he certainly wasn’t a kung-fu master or anything cool like that. Great people like Ghandi and Mandela also fought many of their epic battles using words. The ancient Greeks thought words to be so important that they sent people to university to learn the art of rhetoric. In Greek society only people who could use word to influence others remained in power for very long. Strength of arms was secondary to rhetoric.

Back to what I was saying in the beginning, words are cool because even though my imagination is limited I can piggyback on the imagination of Tolkien, Shakespeare, Gabe Newell or Steven Spielberg.

P.S. Don’t bother with introspection because you’ll just burst you own bubble.