Word

“Be careful what you say—you may have to eat your words.”

I don’t think so much about eating my words as about wearing them. When someone sees me, the words come back to haunt like a miasma around me. No matter how colourful my dress, bad words turn everything grey and muddy brown.

LI

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

--The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
(trans. Edward Fitzgerald, 1st ed.)

Without another word spoken on either side, the lodger took from his great trunk, a kind of temple, shining as of polished silver, and placed it carefully on the table.

'Right again, quite right,' said Mr Swiveller, 'caution is the word, and caution is the act.'

mortar my words
with particles
prepositions
adverbs
and conjunctions

on Mar 22nd 2001, 02:07:31, Natasha Jordan wrote the following about

word

Think how much acceptance Mary showed when she said:

»Let it be done to me according to thy word.«

================================================

And how much courage.

»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«


There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.


»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«


 – Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
 – The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain [1952], st. I

A man of words and not of deeds
Is like a garden full of weeds.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was 32 bits.

Words beginning with the »sn« sound in English are often unpleasant: snide, snob, snigger, sneer, snicker, snub, snert, snotty, snippy, snit, snarl, snore, sneak, snag. »Snow« is a word over which there is debate and even an annual change of heart. The first snowfall is almost always welcomed. Christmas snow is considered magical. But too much of a good thing for too long and March blizzards push »snow« into line with the rest of the »sn« words.

A word after a word after a word is power.

(Margaret Atwood)

Words are like prodigies. They may want to stay inside where it is safe and warm but they'll never live if they never play outside...and find themselves lost in the cold.

The word is powerless yet powerful. The word can be a mere 8 bits, or the flame that burns a city to the ground. Words sting, caress, re-assure, and destruct.

We become wordsmiths innately, learning language before we learn to walk or talk. And still, we continue our development, our love affair with words, until the day we die.

Which is more useful to you: a dictionary that tells you how to use a word or a dictionary that tells you how a word is used?